Sarcophagus
by The Cat's Whiskers
Summary: Set Season 5, just before Meridian. SG1 discover the civilisation who invented the Sarcophagus technology before Telchak swiped it. It doesn't go well, especially after they accidentally create a telepathic link between the emotionally estranged Jack and
1. Chapter 1

_**Summary: **This story occurs after **The Sentinel **but before **Meridian**_ _in Season 5_****_Spoilers for Seasons 1-5 with special reference to __**Need, Shades of Grey, Menace, The Light **and **Summit/Last Stand**._

SARCOPHAGUS 

**Part 1**

Disinterestedly, Colonel Jack O'Neill scuffed away a bit of moss protruding from a cracked stone in the floor of the massive…temple? Palace? Stock Exchange? One-Million-Years-B.C. Shopping Mall?

He blew out a breath of utter boredom and checked out his team. Major Samantha Carter's cornflower eyes were gleaming with intelligence and excitement as her slender fingers danced lightly over the console of the scientific doohicky she'd brought with them to take readings of stuff…what would those fingers feel like brushing delicately over his own willingly submissive body…? Jack immediately averted his eyes to his friend, the ex-Jaffa Teal'c, for such imaginings were a Road Not To Be Travelled.

The huge former First Prime of Apophis was standing rigidly upright with the usual stoicism he displayed in public – he had actually 'unbent' quite a lot in the last half-decade he'd spent as part of SG-1, but only those closest to him would notice any obvious difference in his manner; Jack did now, seeing where most others wouldn't how Teal'c was examining his surroundings with the same keen intelligence and great curiosity displayed by Sam and…yep, there he was…Dr Daniel Jackson, SG-1's archaeologist, linguist and First Contact expert, currently practically kissing a stone plaque in his attempt to make out the symbols on it.

Automatically, Jack glanced up although he knew he would see nothing. The Orbitals had been designed that way, their 'biogenic' pigmentation allowing them to remain hidden in clouds or reflect off sensors as birds or something. Jack had been lost the instant they started flinging words like 'biogenic' and 'chameleon DNA molecular-synthesis' around. Despite his current desire to be fishing in a Colorado lake, Jack's lips twitched into a smile. When the NID had forced General Hammond to resign by threatening the lives of his grandchildren, they had roused a sleeping dragon. Formerly a man who possessed too much of a tendency to 'follow orders', trusting in the Air Force's own internal checks and balances to put the brakes on amoral sociopaths and greedy opportunists like Colonel Samuels, Colonel Simmons, Colonel Maybourne and Senator Kinsey, George Hammond had finally realised it wasn't going to happen and had become a lot more…_proactive_… in his command style.

Serendipitously, Hammond found a President on his wavelength, their new Head of State's quiet manner fooling many into thinking he was just another politician. The President had in fact been doing some hard thinking and he had just a few days ago ordered a massive change in procedure that had sent shock waves through everyone connected to Stargate Command.

Ignoring the current seismic upheavals caused by the Executive Order (which Jack in the main agreed with), O'Neill turned his mind back to the Rebirth of General Hammond. A shrewd operator and never one to overplay his hand, Hammond had started off with little things and gradually let NID and other foolish types glimpse his fangs and claws. Deciding to use the NID's illicit operations to his own advantage, Hammond had ordered Area 51 to produce as many of the Orbitals' as they could; when NID had balked, Hammond had been backed up by the President who had been a lot less amiable in his orders to the cowed agents.

As far as Jack understood it, the Orbitals, technology found by NID operatives on a long-abandoned planet as opposed to stuff they had stolen from populated worlds, were basically spy satellites but were only the size of a baseball. With minimum moving parts and giving out almost no detectable energy signature, the Orbitals had an operational lifespan of several Earth centuries so could be left _in situ_. Since a MALP was sent through to every new Stargate address first, Hammond ordered that an Orbital be sent with it, the small ball would immediately "drop off" the MALP upon reintegration on the other side and move high up into the atmosphere where it could map the entire planet and the immediate vicinity of outer space within forty-eight Earth hours.

There had always been a high risk that the Stargate addresses on the Abydos Cartouche, now safely stored in the SGC computers, would lead to Goa'uld inhabited worlds, such as now-dead Hathor's planet. When Jack had had the language of the Ancients downloaded into his brain he had input hundreds of _new_ addresses into the SGC system; after Thor and the Asgard had removed the knowledge, the two data sources had been compared and it was decided to concentrate on those Asgard addresses that didn't also appear on the Abydos cartouche list, to avoid confrontation with the Goa'uld.

This policy had been successfully pursued and the Stargate teams shared discovered technology and new civilisations with allies such as the Asgard and the Tok'Ra. Daniel had previously managed to persuade the Asgard to revive the ancient 'Protected Planets' Treaty preventing enslavement of primitive cultures by the Goa'uld, now known as the Tau'ri Alliance as it comprised of the Asgard, the Nox, the SGC and sundry other highly advanced alien cultures, instead of the original quartet of the Asgard, the Nox, the Furlings and the Ancients. Surprisingly, there had been those on several worlds willing to become a host to a Tok'Ra symbiote, and for the first time in over a century, the Tok'Ra were enjoying population _expansion_ rather than depletion, helped by having a ready made source of new hosts in the Jaffa who joined the Rebellion, since these were already accustomed to carrying a Goa'uld symbiote.

However, in spite of these positive outcomes, ignoring the Abydos Cartouche addresses entirely hadn't always been practical. Also, because some addresses were so far "out", they needed 8 or more chevrons to reach them, which the SGC simply lacked the power for; others were on worlds now uninhabitable or that had been destroyed.

There was also the fact that the Abydos Cartouche addresses were more likely to lead the SG teams to worlds populated by transplanted humans who could be rescued from slavery to the Goa'uld, just as they found Teal'c and subsequently rescued many Jaffa, including his mentor Bra'tac and son Rya'c. On several occasions it had occurred that addresses had reached a Goa'uld infested world and the Stargate had had to be immediately disengaged. Undetectable to Goa'uld technology, the Orbital had then slipped off while the MALP was the sacrificial lamb, and simply floated unnoticed in the sky. Programmed to send data through an open wormhole to pre-set friendly worlds, or Earth, whenever the Stargate was activated, the Orbitals had sent vital intelligence regarding Goa'uld worlds and activities. Indeed, two such planets had been liberated from the Goa'uld when the Orbitals recorded the particular System Lord departing and leaving only "skeleton crews" of Jaffa behind. Indeed, when the Stargate teams had been able to demonstrate that their 'God' was nowhere near divine, some of these Jaffa had joined the resistance.

Of equal scientific import was the Orbitals use on worlds like this one upon which Jack O'Neill was even now standing. Despite their mission to "seek out new worlds and boldly go where no-one has gone before", as Jack had theatrically declaimed to a group of impressed natives, the Stargate teams often saw nothing of a planet beyond the immediate vicinity of the Stargate itself and at the very most a two-to-ten mile radius. True, the Ancients had almost always built the Stargates in the optimum position on each particular planet, nearest the hub of most useful activity, but that could and did change over time, as evinced by Earth's Antarctica Gate, apparently the original Stargate built by the Ancients as opposed to the Egyptian one made later by Ra.

Since it was highly unlikely that the Ancients would have deliberately positioned the Stargate in one of the most bitterly inhospitable places on Earth, logic dictated that once Antarctica had been just another lush, fertile continent inhabited by people perfectly unflustered by having a Stargate next to them. Additionally of course, hostile alien cultures such as the Goa'uld were also capable of destroying an original Stargate or moving it to a location suitable for their own ends, and the system was incapable of making the distinction between an Ancients' original Stargate and a later replacement/relocation.

As long as a Stargate was situated on or in synchronous orbit directly above a planet, it could be dialled to easily, as SG-1 had proved when they'd used Daniel's alternate reality co-ordinates to save Earth from Apophis. However, they had instantly lost the ability to gate back when Klorel's ship left orbit, negating the point of origin. SG-1 had also 'gated effortlessly to Tantalus without having to compensate for planetary drift, where they had found Ernest Littlefield, but had been unable to detect that the DHD had been destroyed. The litany of Stargates underwater, in underground prisons, smack-bang in the middle of war zones, et cetera, was surprisingly lengthy.

Jack had heard that it was Daniel – nothing surprising there – who had espoused the theory that Antarctica might very well be the basis for the legends of Atlantis, Earth's lost, first great civilisation. Jack had always tended to equate 'myths and legends' with 'complete fairy stories' but to his surprise a lot of the archaeology boffins at Area 51 and Washington D.C. were taking Daniel seriously. Certainly an advanced civilisation there when the rest of the planet was still inventing the wheel would explain why the Ancients had chosen to build the Stargate there and would back up the claim Ancient Orlan had made to Sam that Ancients had originated from Earth, something Oma Desala had also implied to Daniel on Kheb. The idea that the human species was apparently much, much older than previously thought was still causing all sorts of excitement that Jack didn't really understand but recognised as important, especially after that incident a couple of weeks ago when the normally reticent Daniel had nearly got into a fist-fight with some Area 51 anthropologist who had contemptuously dismissed Daniel's finally public statement of his theory that humans and Ancients were the same thing.

Jack wasn't at all sure he bought _that_ idea. If so, why had the supposedly 'benevolent' Ancients _abandoned_ their less technologically developed fellow human brethren to the ravages of some sort of primordial plague in order to Ascend? Leaving those that survived the disease – if that's what it was - later defenceless against enslavement by the Goa'uld and struggling to exist in a primitive environment when the Ancients had obviously had the technology to protect the entire planet was hardly the nicest thing to do. However, these days Jack found himself listening more intently to Daniel's endless fount of Earth myths because time after time they proved to be not fiction at all, but solid, real facts – albeit fancifully embellished. It was one such obscure myth about a minor Greek demigod called Blind Io, who in fact was able to see everything, that had led the original NID thieves to the abandoned planet where they discovered the Orbitals in the first place.

Once again Jack glanced upwards, though intellectually he knew it was futile to try and spot the well-disguised devices. Orbitals could survey an entire planet, and relay important data back to the SGC, such as: "this continent is deserted, but the one over there has a Goa'uld Mothership sat on it." When the NID had made noises about the cost, Sam Carter had brought the President totally on board by showing him and the gathered Joint Chiefs of Staff firstly the pictures of Cassandra's home world of Hanka and the last pictures the SGC had received from the MALP of Major Henry Boyd and his team. She had then quietly explained to them that if Orbitals had been available back then, Nirrti's Mothership would have been detected above Hanka in plenty of time to save SG-7 and the Hankans, and also Major Henry Boyd's team would still have been alive today, since the Orbital would have detected the infant black hole and connection to that doomed world could have been terminated long before there was any threat.

The two Orbitals currently orbiting high, high overhead had showed this to be a long-deserted world that had once housed a very technologically advanced race, a race that had apparently wiped themselves out in some internecine war – the ethereal, once beautiful buildings all over the planet, now covered with millennia of foliage, showed the remnants of major blast damage. Every urban centre had dozens of massive craters; entire "blocks" of buildings were twisted and split apart; what had obviously been major roads and some sort of train network were collapsed into rubble. There were signs of atmospheric and submarine damage too, suggestive concentrations of chemical-laden mineral deposits and "heavy" elements.

Alert as always despite his inner musings, Jack scanned the area. No sentient life forms had been detected, the largest animals an elephant-sized herbivorous mammal that vaguely resembled a stegosaurus without the huge horns and skull-plate, but Jack didn't let his guard down for a second. The Tollan had taught him that – even after SG-1 saved their asses _again _when they had held the trial that freed Skaara from being host to Klorel, the Tollan had _still _maintained a complacent belief in their technological superiority and defensive infallibility over the Goa'uld; that hubris had resulted in their civilisation being virtually wiped out bar a few, scattered survivors and had robbed Earth of a much needed ally in the fight against the Snakeheads.

Normally, SG-1 focussed on populated planets; indigenous populations or transplanted humans that they could make mutual defence treaties with or trade alliances; that was where SG-1's strengths as the SGC's 'flagship' unit lay. Both the old and new President had come to recognise the full importance of the SGC, and since other countries – namely Canada, Britain, Russia, France, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand - had been brought 'in' on the Project, funding and personnel were now not the problem that had enabled that slime Senator Kinsey to try and destroy the programme.

SG-1 to SG-14 had been the 'founding' teams, but there were now twenty-five SG teams comprising of military, scientific, diplomatic, medical, archaeological and anthropological personnel from all 'in the know' countries. Some teams were AAP - anthro-archaeo-paleontology – specialist units (try saying _that_ three times fast, Jack mused to himself) who concentrated on researching the lost civilisations they came across. Others were slanted towards botany or marine biology or were eco-system experts. Still other teams specialised in military history and searching for ever more effective weaponry again the Goa'uld/Replicators/Reetu/insert-the-bad-guy-of-your-choice-here; yet others were purely diplomatic: First Contact specialists whose sole aim was to make treaties, forge alliances and create interstellar diplomatic ties.

The decision so recently made by their newest Commander-in-Chief, that was creating such upheaval currently, was the creation of twelve MFC Teams: Mirror First Contact. Their role it would be to explore the many alternative universes in the Naqahdah Mirror that Daniel Jackson had discovered, and which, to General Hammond's complete _lack _of surprise, the NID had _not_ destroyed as he had ordered.

The SGC Stargate's DHD had long been destroyed, hence their use of the base's computer system (which incidentally had given them much more control over who accessed the gate). Likewise, the hand device that had controlled the Naqahdah Mirror had been destroyed along with the SGC in Daniel's alternate reality. Even nowadays, few people ventured to ask Daniel about it; his curt explanation of how the Dr Sam Carter of that reality had used it to lure a bunch of Jaffa and then killed them all – and herself – with grenades silenced all but the most insensitively curious. Jack had read the full written reports and seeing on paper how his other self, Sam, George Hammond and Catherine Langford had sacrificed themselves to give Daniel a chance to save his world had left Jack feeling uncomfortably…weird.

On a purely practical note, it had taken the boffins much longer to come up with a way to use current earth technology to replace the hand device than it had for them to jury-rig a new DHD. Dr Fraiser had authorised brief trips back to the now irradiated Mirror planet, but the civilisation there had been destroyed before they could log the origin of the Mirror. With no way of knowing where the civilisation had brought the Mirror from, there was no hope of making contact with whoever had built it or obtaining another hand device except by random chance, so the boffins had had to start from scratch.

Moved to a TSE (Totally Secured Environment) at an even lower level – 35 - in Cheyenne Mountain than Stargate Command at Level 28, the Naqahdah Mirror teams and support personnel were tasked with venturing into the alternate dimensions of the Mirror. SG-1's equivalent, MFC-1, comprised former Major, now Colonel, Ferretti and his three hellions – Chen, Morgan and X. Formerly SG2, under Ferretti, all had all chosen to follow their leader on this new path. With Kawalsky dead, Ferretti, Jack and Daniel were now the last surviving members of the original Stargate mission – which seemed to Jack sometimes a million years past now – and as such held a pre-eminent place in the SGC.

Jack would never admit he worried about Ferretti; the twinkling-eyed New York Italian would never let him live it down, but it didn't take a genius to work out that Mirror Travel was exponentially far more dangerous even than Stargate travel. However, Ferretti had been confident, and Jack was perceptive enough to realise that in a deep, subconscious way, Ferretti _needed_ an opportunity to fix things, to have the chance to save some other Kawalsky, some other Sha're, some other Major Boyd; Colonel Cromwell; Cimmuria; Hanka; some other _Earth_.

Daniel Jackson had not attended the official commencement of the MFC programme, as the memories were simply too painful. The way that the alternative Earth he had been inadvertently sent to was brutally conquered by Apophis, with that Sam Carter, Jack O'Neill and George Hammond all killed because they had used their opportunity of escape instead to give Daniel the chance to save _his_ Earth weighed heavily upon the archaeologist, and even now he was given to brooding. Though Daniel was unaware of it, Jack was aware that Daniel's still obvious grief had engendered in the fledgling MFC teams a determination to help out those in other dimensions as much as they were able, for Dr Jackson was immensely popular amongst the SGC personnel generally.

Indeed, as if some cosmic sign of approval, Ferretti's first MFC mission was a resounding success beyond anyone's wildest hopes. The Naqahdah Mirror had still been on the home world of the civilisation destroyed by the Goa'uld in _this_ reality, and even more amazingly, that Goa'uld attack hadn't yet reached them. MFC-1 had stepped out the Mirror in front of their startled lab personnel, obviously a bipedal hominid species and Ferretti was able to convey their friendly intentions. More complex communication had ensued and thus forewarned, the Ulaarem had taken immediate action, deciding to evacuate the majority of the population and arranging defences against the attack. Lieutenant Chen had hit upon the idea of sending the civilians to the Nox world, who of course had been amazed at the arrival of such large numbers along with Ferretti who had beseeched Lya to contact the Asgard. Helped by Thor, the Ulaarem and the SGC had been prepared and thwarted Apophis' attack.

Jack had been present for the conference between General Hammond and General Hammond as the two men talked through the Mirror. It had been a bizarre experience, exchanging exasperated glances with his 'other self' as the two Carters went into scientific rapture and incomprehensible explanations of the 'temporal anomaly'. Apparently the fact that in this reality Apophis' attack had occurred over four years ago, while in that one it had still been four months away when Ferretti and the gang arrived was enormously significant, though Jack couldn't follow Carter's explanation once she got past "'You see, sir, the…'"

There were of course many differences in that reality, just as there had been in the one Daniel originally went to and also the one that Alternate Carter and Kawalsky had come from. SG-1 as Jack, Sam, Teal'c and Daniel had existed there, but their Hammond was only a Brigadier-General, not a Major-General (something _the_ General Hammond had not drawn attention to). In that reality, Kawalsky had never been infested by Goa'uld and was now Colonel Kawalsky of SG-2.

General Hammond had explained to his counterpart that he could not step through to the other side, because the same matter could not exist simultaneously in the space-time continuum for very long without losing structural cohesion. Ferretti and his team had been able to exist easily in that reality without ill-effect because there it had been them as SG-3 not SG-7 that had died on Hanka with Nehrti's other victims, just as the first Alternate Kawalsky had been okay in this reality because Kawalsky here was dead, whereas the first Alternate Sam had rapidly suffered increasingly debilitating problems due to her proximity to this reality's Sam.

Jack had ended up with a blinding headache within the first ten minutes and the absolute knowledge that no language was capable of the grammatical flexibility to deal with this sort of thing. One thing that had become obvious was how the 'four years ahead' status of this reality had given their counterparts a huge helping hand. Forewarned of those slimeballs Kinsey, Maybourne and Simmons and the NID, plus the existence of Seth, Osiris and Isis on Earth had enabled the SGC to make pre-emptive strikes. They'd been able to explain the origin of the replicators to the Asgard, and prevent the Tollan being exterminated. They had sought out the Tok'Ra, including Jolinar and Martouf who were alive and well in their reality.

On a more personal note, the information of the doomed mission here to save Sha're had enabled SG-1 there to kidnap her alive from Apophis's base and also snatch Skaara. The Tok'Ra had killed Ammonet and Klorel, and Sha're was now living on Earth with that Daniel Jackson and their baby daughter, with frequent visits from proud uncle Skaara and grandpa Kasuf from Abydos. That reality was now locked in the Mirror's address system and was forging a strong intergalactic alliance with the Nox, Tollan and Asgard against the Goa'uld. To Jack's inward satisfaction, they also weren't slow to acknowledge the enormous debt they owed the people of this reality, and it had seemed to give Daniel some peace of mind to know that at least in one place, he and Sha're were enjoying a happy life together.

Jack shook off the wool-gathering and looked around his current surroundings with absolutely no affection. Unfortunately,

in _this _reality, when all was said and done, bacteria still ruled supreme. The NID had done the catering for the highly-classified, quarterly-held scientific brainstorming conference in Washington D.C. (ostensibly a meeting of the American Medical Association), and possibly in a financial swipe at General Hammond, had done so definitely 'on the cheap'. The result was that within twenty-four hours most of the attendees were worshipping the porcelain with Technicolor yawns courtesy of some dodgy chicken. With most of the SGC's scientific contingent prostrate, pallid and weakly begging their respective military-personnel SG team mates to 'just shoot me now', there would be a desperate lack of boffins for at least a week.

Due to being on Abydos for some important political ceremony he couldn't miss because to being Kasuf's son-in-law and a tribal elder in his own right, Daniel was one of the fewer than a score astronomical-IQ types who had avoided the food poisoning. Consequently the few full-strength SG teams were stretched to the limit, which was why SG-1 and not a specialist AAP SG Team were checking out _this_ planet.

Jack eyed Teal'c with bored disfavour. Teal'c _had_ attended the conference as the SGC's resident Goa'uld expert, despite persistent paranoid grumbles from NID/bigoted Senator-Kinsey-type clones. 'Junior', the maturing Goa'uld larvae he carried, had reacted with vehement disapproval to the chicken dish after Teal'c had taken a single mouthful, and the big Jaffa had simply avoided it. What he _had not done_ was mention this to anyone else!

It transpired that the strict diet followed by Jaffa was not entirely religious in nature but designed to alleviate stress on the symbiote they carried. Since joining the SGC, Teal'c had largely jettisoned the ritual diet imposed by Apophis, but apparently Junior had definite preferences and dislikes and could make these known to Teal'c, usually when the big Jaffa entered the meditative state of 'Kel Na'reem', or more instantly via violent movement in the nurturing 'pouch' when it recognised an immediate problem. Like Carter, Junior was a chocoholic and a caffeine addict, though Jack rebelled inwardly at anthromorphasising the snake.

Jack watched as Daniel began to scan images of some of the statues into his camera, and wandered over curiously as Daniel had that thoughtfully puzzled expression on his face that tended to mean he was onto something significant. Jack raised an eyebrow when he realised that Daniel was concentrating on those statues most recent, since usually Daniel's interest zeroed in on whatever was the oldest part of a site. SG-1's archaeologist was now looking from one statue to another intently.

"You got something?" Jack hated that feeling in the pit of his stomach that had recently been stopping him adding one of his usual nicknames to the end of the question.

Though on the surface everything was okay, Jack was acutely aware that in reality there was an underlying constraint between himself and Daniel Jackson, and indeed had been ever since Jack had managed to catch the NID thieves by virtue of his undercover gig for the Tollan and the Asgard. Unfortunately the haul had including SG-3's Colonel Vincent Makepeace, who rather surprisingly considering SG-3 were Marines, had developed quite a friendship with Daniel Jackson, along with his three men.

That event had led to seismic upheaval within the Stargate programme. The sheer number of personnel who were found to be colluding with the NID and those who had resigned/transferred out of the programme as a show of support had been shocking and disturbing. The Air Force brass had responded with a typically knee-jerk reaction of flooding the SGC with stereotypically military 'goon' orders-are-orders-are-orders idiots and the result was an unprecedented level of tension and friction between the civilian and military personnel. This was particularly true between the 'boffins' and the 'warriors'; the new Marine units treated the scientists with open contempt, the scientists responded with the obvious view that the soldiers were testosterone-overloaded morons.

Although Jack's reluctant mission at the personal behest of Thor had occurred a good eighteen months ago now, subsequent missions had only served to crank up the stress levels for the SGC and within the flagship team of SG-1 itself. There had been his own – admittedly – unconscionable attitude on Euronda; it still made him shiver to realise how close he came to helping a bunch of Nazis destroyed half their planetary population – would have without Daniel's persistence, and okay he hadn't handled it well.

However, Jack had no regrets about taking down the robot-girl, Reese; otherwise the SGC would have been overrun with replicators. However, he also couldn't forget Daniel's grief – and rage. Many people underestimated Daniel Jackson's ability to hate or to react with vicious and cold-blooded physical violence if provoked sufficiently enough, but Daniel had _never_ aimed that venom at Jack – until that point. _You stupid son-of-a-bitch…_Recently, whenever Daniel got heated over something, those words had echoed in Jack's mind, and he recalled all too clearly the vicious fury in Daniel's voice and eyes as he'd spat the words at him. Jack remembered how grateful he'd been at the time that Daniel didn't have a gun on him.

The underlying tension that permeated everything these days was becoming increasingly wearing to Jack's nerves. Quite often – like right now – Jack struggled to keep his tone even and not allow a subtle aggression to show, his instinct being to push Daniel into 'letting it go' and getting back to the way things should be. He was getting damn tired of this churning feeling in his stomach all the time, and pretty soon he would sort things out with Danny-boy once and for all if Jackson wouldn't get over his snit. It had been nearly two years since his undercover mission for crying out loud!

Daniel shrugged, "I _think_ that all these most recent statues are the same 'Cardassian', which means he, she or it must have been a planetary leader, or someone who had a colossal impact on their culture."

Jack looked at the statue; what he knew about archaeology could fit on the back of a postage stamp, but after a while you picked things up. Over time things got a "patina" on them, a layer of grime and weathering that could be used to determine authenticity or age. The patina on these statues wasn't as dark as a lot of the others, indicating more recent creation. Very tall, completely hairless bipeds with prominent noses and uniformly small, almost vestigial ears, depictions of the race seemed to show that the species had bony ridges of cartilage that ran from just under each earlobe to the end of what in a human would be the scapula or the top of the arm where the shoulder ended. That vague similarity had been enough to get PX-whatever and it's extinct populace nicknamed Cardassia and Cardassians after the _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ aliens. Only geniuses like Carter remembered the binary codes used by the computers to record these planets anyway!

"Look at the stone these statues are made of." Daniel said softly.

"Multi-coloured." Jack spotted immediately, giving Daniel a significant glance.

Data from the Orbitals and UAV flyovers of the planet's surface had indicated that commemorative statuary played an enormous role in 'Cardassian culture'. Even small, isolated villages had had several small clearly ornamental stone sculptures prominently placed. These statues also seemed to be colour-coded. Military-looking ones were always carved from a granite-like stone that had a lot of pink and red striations; agricultural type statues seemed to have green striations, others had blue and yellow, etc. In some cases, even in very small towns that presumably didn't have a lot of money, the stone for a particular statue seemed to have been shipped there from the other side of the planet, indicating a profound importance to the type and colour of stone used. The statues of this individual all seemed to be of a very rare rainbow-hued stone.

"Colonel!"

Jack hurried over to where Sam had shouted, aware of Daniel and Teal'c following him, hearing the excitement in her voice. She was standing at the doorway to a massive skyscraper type building, which was now open – dim lighting flickered to life in the hallways as even as Jack approached. He barely glanced at the way Carter had rearranged the small geometrically shaped crystals in the small panel on the wall. A surprisingly large number of alien cultures – the Asgard, Nox, Tollan, Ancients and Goa'uld for instance – used crystals as part of their technology, and since Carter had been host to Jolinar and worked one-to-one with Thor's Asgard scientist colleagues, plus the Tollan, she had developed an affinity for crystalline-based technologies.

Several of the science types at Norad had theorised that Earth's plentiful supply of quartz and other minerals may have been what drew at least some of these alien cultures to the planet in the first place, since Earth was, in cosmic terms, an insignificant backwater or an unimportant hamlet in the boondocks. To the Goa'uld for instance, their Holy Grail was Naqahdah and Naquadriah, of which Earth possessed not a drop in either case, yet they had gone to the tremendous effort of trying to conquer the planet or at least part of it. Systems that utilised crystal-based technology were now being invented based on alien prototypes and experimentally used on Earth. Since the collapse of communism in Russia, the country had been in terrible financial straits, and the Russian government was surreptitiously using cheap, long-lasting, non-polluting crystal technology to maintain its power stations, hospital equipment and so forth; so far the experiments had all been completely successful.

Jack nodded his head once and the four fell into the familiar pattern. Teal'c took point, his staff weapon ever ready, Jack covered the left flank and Sam the right with Daniel guarding their 'six' or back in civilian parlance, the foursome making a near perfect diamond shape - ◊ - as they advanced cautiously into the building, spread out just enough for each to cover the other while not being bunched so close together that an assailant could cut more than one of them down at once. Lights obviously powered by motion sensors were flickering on haphazardly ahead of them, mostly very dim as if the system were on emergency lighting back up.

Jack O'Neill distrusted it all _immensely_. Crystal-based technology was small, durable, cheap and completely non-polluting, but tended to last for millennia instead of decades or even centuries, and that wasn't necessarily always A Good Thing. On Earth today, French farmers were still getting blown up by landmines planted in World War I nearly ninety years ago; Daniel had ended up in the loony bin and Teal'c almost in his grave after SG-1 inadvertently triggered one of the anti-Goa'uld booby traps set by the long-dead Machello decades earlier. There had been that damn six-hour time loop that had gone on for months and months before they'd managed to break it, and that Goa'uld 'opium den' with the addictive light-show that had seen Daniel Jackson spaced out and ready to try and fly off his own apartment balcony. Jack had thus learned the hard way that all too often 'dead civilisations' were really just dormant, and could bite you in the ass if you hit the wrong button.

The people of this world had destroyed themselves in a particularly vicious civil war. Had this building escaped largely unscathed due to happy coincidence, or had it been preserved because it harboured some nasty little Doomsday device that the 'other side' had been intending to get their hands on? Were they in danger of accidentally triggering some countdown that would disintegrate the planet – and them with it?

There was only one way to find out. _Oh well, that's why they pay us the big bucks_. "Spread out and search – never more than twenty metres apart from each other, five minute voice checks if we're out of line of sight." Jack ordered.

They drifted away from him, scanning the variety of rooms that seemed to be laboratories and offices. Automatically, Jack tried to keep a weather eye on Daniel, acutely aware – and finding himself deeply resentful – of the fact that these days the archaeologist was obeying him to the letter, whereas at one time within two minutes Daniel would have been enthralled by some new discovery and oblivious to his surroundings. Jack knew that on the surface his attitude would appear petulant since he was finally getting what he wanted after years of complaining. However, Jack was aware that Daniel's obedience stemmed from the wrong motive: _lack_ of trust.

He bit back the urge to sigh as he explored his surroundings. Going undercover and pretending to be one of Colonel Maybourne's cronies had been hard enough, but the hardest part had been to throw Daniel's efforts back in his face when the younger man made a special effort to visit him. Jack certainly hadn't bought that 'we drew straws and I lost' claim after all the dust had settled. But Jack had had no choice – he _knew_ his house had to be bugged, and even outside in his back yard couldn't take the risk that there wasn't some NID guy sat out of sight with a parabolic microphone trained on him.

Carter and Teal'c had been upset, but in the end it came down to their military training and understanding of the 'chain of command' – they were aware that there were certain things they wouldn't be cleared to know and they simply got on with it once the truth was revealed and Jack was back in charge. To Daniel Jackson's civilian mind, however, things were much more black and white: either he was trusted or he wasn't. He viewed things like 'codeword clearance' and 'need to know' as merely sophistry, mealy-mouthed attempts to weasel out of deceit and lies.

Though Jack had seen all the files on Daniel Jackson, a lot of the archaeologist's pre-SGC life had still been 'unknown', but after the Major Kerrison thing blew up last month, it had become clear to everyone at the SGC that Dr Jackson had not had a happy life before the first Abydos mission led him to Sha're. For several days after Kerrison had been sent back to Washington with a flea in his ear, Jack had found that his dreams were of the virtual reality scenarios he and SG-1 had experienced on the Gamekeeper's planet, and his dreams replayed in accurate detail the brief glimpse he had had of the day in the New York Museum of Art when eight-year-old Daniel Jackson had horrifically seen his mother and father crushed to death by a collapsed exhibit.

Daniel Jackson was very much a sharp-eyed observer, standing on the sidelines and taking it all in, rather than an active participant. While physically unpretentious about 'personal space', he rarely let others into his life in an _emotional_ sense, and more rarely still actively reached out. However, he had done so to Jack and Jack was aware of the tremendous damage his apparent bad attitude had inflicted on their friendship. Theirs had never been an easy relationship – they had very different personalities, and had had to work on finding common ground, unlike Jack's immediate and close bond with Teal'c with whom he had shared an instant warrior 'rapport' and still very much did.

Daniel was wary now, closed off. Jack was beginning to be increasingly resentful of Daniel's cautious attitude, as if Jack was some dangerous animal at a zoo that was only safe from a distance, though admittedly he wasn't the only one to be so marked; in the past month there had been two separate inter-alliance meetings with the Asgard and the Nox, neither of which Daniel had attended. On both occasions the representatives had commented on Daniel's absence, but Jack had succeeded in brushing them off with a joking reference to Daniel 'still being sore about not being told' about Jack's secret mission to destroy the NID artefact-stealing ring. It was obvious that Daniel had clearly tarred the Asgard and the Nox with the same brush. Unfortunately, with almost two Earth years having elapsed since the mission, Daniel's continued avoidance of alliance meetings was getting harder and harder to excuse, plausibly and otherwise.

Cautiously peering around yet another corner, O'Neill had to admit to himself that part of his aggression came from the fact that he was feeling just a bit on the defensive. He had never been enthralled with keeping the mission a secret from the rest of SG-1 anyway, but what had shaken him – and a lot of other people including the new President – was the amount of _support_ ex-SG-3 Team commander Colonel Vincent Makepeace and his ilk had received. Only a minority of those involved were like Colonels Maybourne, Simmons and Senator Kinsey: operating out of selfish amoral greed or bigoted fanatical terror of the unknown. Makepeace and several others had been court-martialled for treason, but the President had commuted their sentences to life imprisonment, rattled like a lot of the other top brass by the sheer volume of their comrades who clearly _agreed _with their opinions.

Jack had been astounded when Vincent Makepeace pleaded 'not guilty', but the harrowing and complex Courts Martial had proven explicitly that a lot of the NID operatives were not criminals, but genuinely _believed_ in what they were doing – Newman certainly had for instance. Vincent Makepeace considered himself to be a loyal member of the SGC and a 'patriotic' Earthman. He had no beef with or dislike of the Asgard, Nox, Tollan, Tok'Ra or any of Earth's other allies, but by the same token he had no _faith_ in them – not so much their _ability_, but rather their _willingness,_ to aid Earth when the chips were down. As he freely admitted at his own Court Martial, Colonel Makepeace had become part of the NID's artefact theft operation because in his opinion Earth seemed to be doing all the work, while the Asgard just sat there and metaphorically patted them on the head as if they were clever pets that had learned a new trick.

Certainly those involved in the thefts could have had a field day incriminating or outright framing subordinates, superiors and colleagues, instead of which many had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the innocence of comrades, friends and family was proven, even when it had heightened the risk of being caught. Despite the fact that their career and promotion prospects could be seriously affected, many Air Force personnel and others continued to send letters, gifts and to visit the now life-imprisoned NID thieves such as Vincent Makepeace. Some psychobabbler had claimed that the entire SGC had suffered a 'profound psychological trauma' and Jack was beginning to agree.

The other three members of SG-3: Chen, Morgan and Michaels, completely unaware of what Makepeace was doing, had resigned from the Air Force after Makepeace's Court Martial and in so doing robbed the project of a total of nearly half a century's worth of experience and knowledge. Their reasons had been blunt; they agreed with their commander's worldview, and had they known of his activities, would have been first in line to volunteer their help. Dozens of experienced Marines, technicians, scientists, pilots and others had also either resigned their commissions or requested transfer away from the Project as a show of support. An unpleasantly large number had made it very clear by their attitudes that in their opinion, Makepeace and the NID were persecuted heroes trying to protect Earth's interests, while Hammond, O'Neill and the SGC had 'sold out'. It had been the various Courts Martial that had revealed, to Jack's surprise, how Daniel Jackson had been on very good terms with all four SG-3 team members and in truth, nagging at him constantly these days was the question of just how much did Daniel _agree_ with Makepeace? Or even more sinisterly, _support_ him?

Oh, Danny-boy was far too honourable a man to countenance for a second something like stealing the Touchstone from a living culture that needed it like Princess Lamora's people, but if you looked at it in a certain way, wasn't archaeology in many ways perilously close to legalised looting? Daniel certainly had no qualms about utilising technology left behind by long-extinct civilisations and hauling it back through the Stargate wholesale if he thought it would benefit Earth, which same had formed a large part of Makepeace and the NID's self-justification and defence counsel arguments.

In the aftermath of the NID's fall, there had been a lot of senior-level meetings that inevitably degenerated into shouting matches about 'loyalty'. Jack had nearly punched out one NSA suit who had harped on about Dr Daniel Jackson's spectacularly bad reaction to Jack's mission and its fallout, especially as pertaining to SG-3. The jackass had actually used the term 'security risk' twice in the same sentence and a lot of the Pentagon brass had sat there like a row of nodding dogs; some of the Pentagon dinosaurs had never been happy about mixed civilian-military teams and were trying to seize on the opportunity to make every SG team like SGs 21-25, who were all various military Special Forces units.

Jack had dealt with the situation; he found that leaping out of your chair, yelling more loudly than anyone else and interspersing your diatribe with vicious sarcasm (such as warning people about the dangerous levels of gas in the room) tended to get people's attention. He had succeeded in the majority of his 'damage control' – mainly because Jack O'Neill was the combined 'pet' of the Asgard, Nox and now extinct Tollan. Being close friends with the Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet really helped sometimes…

Nevertheless, Jack found himself almost continually filled with disquiet these days - he often found himself furtively watching Daniel when the young archaeologist wasn't looking and trying to convince himself that he had total faith in Daniel, but it wasn't working. Worry preyed on him constantly – it hadn't actually happened, but if Daniel had been forced into a position where he had to make a choice, would he have come to Jack – or gone over to Makepeace's side? Jack found he was no longer certain of a question that once upon a time he would have confidently answered without hesitation, and it was driving him _nuts_…

A wave of dizziness washed over him and instantly he snapped up his gun. What…? Jack swept the room, automatically ascertaining his team's positions. Teal'c was in a room ahead looking at some inscribed wall plaques, Sam directly ahead about fifteen metres down the corridor was checking rooms as she passed; to the right he could just see Daniel in a room examining what appeared to be a large, rather ugly looking desk lamp. Nothing, no threat – he looked down at himself and did a quick inventory. He felt fine, except that he was a bit warm, but certainly no fever.

Relaxing infinitesimally but still ready for anything, Jack continued his sweep. It was clear that the fighting had gotten in here. The high-rise building appeared to be similar to MIT or CAL TECH in layout and thus presumably function. Though now faded with the inexorable march of time, blackened streaks from weapons fire were gouged into walls, doors, the ceiling and the floor, and there had been significant destruction of fixtures and fittings.

Thankfully, there were no remains. While under the right conditions a human being's skeleton or mummified corpse could remain intact for centuries, it seemed that Cardassian physiology 'comprised an endoskeleton of softer cartilage that was exceptionally biodegradable' as one of the boffins had put it. While the Cardassians certainly had memorials to their dead roughly equivalent to human cemeteries, graveyards as such were unknown, as if the Cardassians saw little point in erecting a permanent marker over a spot that would be devoid of any trace of the dead one within a few months.

Funnily enough, the memorial sites seemed to come to an end a good while _before_ the archaeological estimates for the destruction of the civilisation itself, which meant either that the Cardassians had stopped dying, or that they had ceased to memorialise their dead for some reason –

"JAAAAAACK!"

Daniel Jackson's yell rang like a crystal bell in the silence, and O'Neill responded instantly. Similar to that cheesy movie _Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey_, in which the furry alien made one word, 'Station', mean anything, so Daniel Jackson could imbue Colonel O'Neill's Christian name with entire paragraphs-worth of subtle meaning. There was his enquiring "Jack?"; his puzzled "Ja-ack?"; his you-are-annoying-me-but-I-don't-really-mind, "Jaack"; his you-really-are-pissing-me-off "Jaaack!"; his downright angry "Jak". The nuances went on and on and on with barely detectable shifts in tone, pronunciation and pitch that Jack O'Neill nevertheless understood as if they were writ large in neon on the Las Vegas strip. This particular "Jaaaaack!" actually meant: 'I'd be really pleased if you'd come here right now with the biggest gun you happen to have on you'.

Feeling something close to actual alarm, Jack raced down the corridor, aware of Carter and Teal'c flanking him. Certainly not foolish enough to run headlong into what could be major trouble, Jack slowed as they saw Daniel standing in an open doorway, looking back at them, clearly physically unharmed.

"Dahnyul." Jack could likewise imbue his utterances of Daniel's name with exquisite shades of meaning depending on how he pronounced and elongated (or didn't) the syllables.

"Jaack."

"What have you found, Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c asked, possibly sensing the two could go on like this for quite some time.

With a deep breath, Daniel swept his arm out towards the inside of the room like a doorman at a posh hotel bidding guests enter. Automatically Jack looked inside. He instantly saw that this room was much bigger than all the others they'd found, almost like a warehouse floor, and his second impression was that it had suffered much more fighting damage than some of the rest combined, but these understandings grasped in the first few seconds were swept from his mind when he saw what the room contained.

Rectangular boxes; each one was over six feet long, at least three feet deep and three feet wide. They ranged in hue from white to metallic silver in colour, and all lacked the ornate gold casing, jewels and hieroglyphics of the Goa'uld, but it was obvious what they were.

_**To be continued…**_

© 2004, Catherine D. Stewart


	2. Chapter 2

_**Disclaimer: **Stargate SG-1 remains the property of Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Greenburg et al. No money is being made from this story. (This story is set before Daniel's "Ascension" as it is my first attempt at a Stargate story and I'm nowhere near confident with the original quartet of characters as it is, never mind trying to get a handle on Jonas Quinn). _

_**Summary: **See Part 1. _

SARCOPHAGUS 

**Part 2**

**CHAPTER TWO**

Jack O'Neill shifted in his chair slightly, enjoying the harried look in Major Paul Davis's eyes as General Hammond came quickly up the spiral staircase from the Stargate Control Room directly below into the Briefing Room. The Briefing Room looked out and down onto the Stargate itself, and it was a view Jack never got tired of.

He cranked up the glare slightly, pleased when Major Davis flinched. In the aftermath of Makepeace's capture, Davis had been seconded permanently as the 'liaison' between Stargate Command and the Pentagon, or as Jack openly called him, the 'Joint Chiefs' pet spy'. Fortunately nobody had been foolish enough to try and get Davis included in General George Hammond's briefing meetings with SG-1 unless the General invited him. However, due to the magnitude of what SG-1 had discovered on Cardassia, both Dr Fraiser and Major Davis were present besides SG-1 and General Hammond himself, who now took his customary place at the head of the large, long desk, indicating that the briefing could now commence.

"So it's definite, those things are…_sarcophagi_." Jack enunciated the word with relish, having taken the precaution of looking up the plural of 'sarcophagus' and practising the pronunciation in front of his bathroom mirror.

"Yes." Dr Janet Fraiser nodded confirmation though it was unnecessary, knowing that – with the exception of Colonel O'Neill - the other six people round the table would have actually read her report. "They don't have the Goa'uld decoration, but they are sarcophagi. However, all of them are either damaged or completely inoperative, which probably accounts for why they were left behind."

Leaning back in his chair, absently rubbing one thumb up and down the side of his coffee mug, Daniel nodded agreement, "It makes sense," he pointed out, "we know the Goa'uld are scavengers. Everything from their technology to their languages and cultures are what they took from their hosts, not the other way around."

"Any further information on why the Cardassians built the sarcophagus technology in the first place?" asked General Hammond. "What happened to their civilisation?"

"No sir," Jack admitted. "The images coming back from the Orbital show that whatever happened, it was big, nasty and global, but apart from that we need to go back and have another scout around."

"Major Carter?"

"I agree, Sir. In fact I'd like to recommend that you assign Cardassia Alpha Level Defence-Science Status to bring back their technology and cultural artefacts through the Stargate as fast as possible."

"It's a dead world, Major," Hammond reminded her.

Carter dipped her head briefly in acknowledgment, "Yes, sir, I know, but that's what I mean. The Cardassians were a highly advanced race – I'd say on a par with or maybe even slightly ahead of the Asgard themselves. The existence of sarcophagi seems to indicate that the Goa'uld looted Cardassia at least once before. I have no idea why they left so much valuable technology behind, maybe the System Lord who discovered it was killed before he or she could transmit the information, but with the luck that SG-1 seem to have these days, do we really want to take a chance on the Goa'uld suddenly coming back for another supermarket sweep?"

"I concur with Major Carter's assessment," Teal'c said flatly, as he said everything flatly. "Cardassia is worthy of further study, at least for the present."

"I take it you make the request unanimous, Dr Jackson?" Hammond enquired.

"Sir," Daniel smiled wryly. "The Stargate seemed to be situated in the capital city of that continent, which gives me the optimum chance of finding the Cardassian Rosetta."

Hammond nodded thoughtfully; after five years with the SGC, even Jack knew without thinking what SGC-associated people meant by 'Rosetta'. Discovered in the late 1700s, the Rosetta stone had enabled Thomas Young and then the great Champollion to finally decipher the previously incomprehensible Egyptian Hieroglyphs, as it was written in three scripts, one of which was Greek. Able to read the Greek, and recognising the repetition of Pharaoh Ptolemy V in each section had allowed the translators to figure out what each hieroglyph denoted.

The same held true for the myriad languages the SG teams encountered through the Stargate. Philologists estimated that modern humans spoke about 3,000 languages, and that perhaps as many as five to ten thousand languages had once existed on Earth, including those now extinct. The SG teams had discovered a corollary with other cultures. Instead of single global societies, many worlds were populated by two or more cultures with distinctive languages and customs; on worlds where the SG teams discovered simply ruins, it was often impossible to determine the native language or languages unless you came across text saying the same thing in both or more languages, just like the Rosetta Stone had done.

"Very well," Hammond decided. "You have a go; dismissed."

"Teal'c! Wait up," Jack carolled as he spotted his Jaffa friend ahead of him in the corridor.

The massive ebony-skinned man obediently halted. "You are ebullient, O'Neill."

"Yeah," Jack frowned then shrugged, "For some reason, I suddenly feel really good, even though ten minutes ago it was just 'another day another dollar'. Now…I'm full of the joys of Spring I guess."

"It is currently your autumn season on this continent, O'Neill."

Teal'c had no equal when it came to the art of deadpan wit, and so O'Neill, having no idea from that impassive face whether Teal'c was serious or making one of his rare jokes, prudently decided not to answer.

"Colonel!" Carter, a big smile on her face was suddenly coming out of a lab ahead of them.

"Carter, how goes the day?" declaimed O'Neill, still feeling remarkably cheerful, though he couldn't have explained quite why.

Incredibly, her smile broadened as she fell in beside the two men as they walked towards the Briefing Room. "Daniel found the Rosetta, sir, or actually one of the UAVs did in one of the city's libraries."

"And what does the Rosetta say that's got you so excited?" Jack asked.

Blushing slightly she admitted, "It's a trade agreement between the Cardassians – actually Daniel says their species were called the Nemetae - and their neighbouring planet, which was called something like Uhutac or Oota – not sure which that this point, for the Ootans to buy sarcophagi. The Nemetae word for the sarcophagus is repeated constantly through both sets of text, Daniel says that both languages are pretty easy to grasp once you've figured out one word, he hopes to help the xeno-linguists at Nellis to begin translating it by Friday."

"I do not see why this information is of such interest to you, Major Carter," Teal'c declared as Jack opened his mouth to less tactfully urge her to get on with it.

"It's because there isn't a Stargate address for Uhutac-stroke-Oota in our system, but the trade agreement seems make reference to one. I'm on my way to stellar cartography now to see if I can calculate the likely position of Uhutac-stroke-Oota and compensate for planetary drift so we can get there…"

"Whoa, Carter." Jack waved his fingers as her eyes began to glaze over with enthusiasm. "Why should there be a Stargate on Hooter or wherever?"

"The Nemetae and Uhutac-Ootans were allies and friends for hundreds of Earth years, sir," Carter patiently explained. "That most likely means that the Uhutac-Ootans were physically like the Nemetae, that is, they lived on an Earth-like planet with a breathable atmosphere and a comparable level of culture and technology."

Jack shrugged. "But if there'd been a Stargate on Oo-whatsit wouldn't I have input it when I got my free 'Place of our Legacy' download?"

Carter shook her head. "Not by a long way, Colonel. You only managed to input a few – relatively speaking - Stargate addresses before General Hammond had Teal'c stop you. Even including the Abydos Cartouche addresses, that's a mere fraction of those that we could access if we only knew the addresses. You also knew we didn't have sufficient power to reach Thallia again so you didn't even start on addresses with eight or more chevrons."

Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "You believe that there are many Stargates that require eight chevrons when dialling?"

"Teal'c, it wouldn't surprise me if there were Stargates out there with addresses nine, ten, eleven, twelve or even more chevrons long. Remember, the only thing preventing us from reaching those addresses is power. Our Stargate only has enough juice to reach seven-chevron addresses – PO plus SDC –"

"What?" His happy mood now evaporating as they closed in on the Briefing Room, Jack glared.

"Sorry, sir, technical jargon; PO plus DC means 'Point of Origin plus Distance Calculations'. Here at the mountain we only have sufficient power for our Stargate to achieve PO plus SDC – Six Distance Calculations. Thallia was PO plus Seven Distance Calculations. My personal theory is that the Stargate system is, well, for all practical purposes, infinite."

Jack considered this for a moment. "Nah, come on Carter, we know now how the Ancients can zip about – Orlan and Oma Desala showed us that. To be honest, I can't see why they ever bothered with Stargates in the first place, never mind built one on every planet they passed."

"I think I know the answer to that, Colonel: Fear," Carter said quietly but with that stubborn tone he recognised.

"Fear of what?" Daniel appeared in the doorway of his office, clearly having caught a good portion of the conversation. "I mean, if Oma Desala was any indication I don't think the Ancients had much reason to fear anything."

"True, but I was actually thinking of other beings' fear of them." Seeing their blank expressions, Carter elaborated, "Colonel, how did you react when you saw the Reetu – Charlie's mom?"

"Yowser!" admitted O'Neill, having a faint inkling of where she was heading.

"Exactly, she created Charlie because she knew how traumatic it would be for us to deal with her directly, so she created her intermediary in a form we could relate to."

"Like the Gadmeer ship created Lotan to interface with the Enkarrans," Daniel put in thoughtfully.

"Exactly," Sam agreed. "Now consider the Ancients. There _seems_ to be a growing trail of evidence that Ancients and humans are the same thing, but think about what they look like in their Ascended form? Take away the 'unearthly angelic glow' and you're basically left with – "

"Tentacles…" realised Jack.

"Right," Carter nodded vigorously, "with all due respect, what resembles a giant squid straight out of Moby Dick. There's no way to know for sure but my theory is that the Stargate was initially invented because not all Ancients developed the ability to Ascend at the same rate."

"Some still didn't have the money to get out of economy into business class," Jack translated.

"Right…However, I think they _expanded_ the Stargate system universally once they had begun it, even after everyone…got into Business Class…because the Ancients started to realise what sort of effect they were having bouncing around the stars like an out-of-control pinball. Their appearance was freaking out the natives and though they may have left a planet quickly they probably realised that they were leaving seismic culture shock in their wake nine times out of ten."

"So how would the Stargate have helped that?" Jack demanded.

"By enabling the Ancients to appear in a form more easily related to, like Lotan and the Enkarrans." Warming to her theme, Carter postulated, "My personal belief is that the Ancients probably scouted a planet invisibly – all floating and other dimensional, then they'd position a Stargate near a major city or important place and just wait for someone to notice it and then they would come through the Stargate in human form, as it's certainly far less threatening than - "

"A giant glowing squid," Teal'c commented, deadpan as ever.

"That's not a bad hypothesis," Daniel praised. "I mean, with the odd extremely rare exception like the Goa'uld – which are the result of a freak cosmic accident anyway - most sentient life forms we've ever encountered anywhere have been entirely or mostly bipedal. Most have some form of vocal chords and at least two upper limbs possessing the equivalent of opposable thumbs – even the Reetu had opposable thumbs. Even highly sophisticated societies like the Asgard would find human-form Ancients easier to relate to than, well, a giant glowing squid."

"That's what I think," Carter affirmed. "It must have been like building the trans-continental railway. Earth is the Grand Central Terminus of a vast intergalactic Stargate network, because we are – if we're right - the home world of the Ancients. Earth is the ultimate Point of Origin. The Ancients went from Earth to planet B, left a Stargate and then went to planet C and so on. They travelled in every direction throughout the universe and each time they went a little further out they built another Stargate so the network extended a little further than it had before. I'd bet there is a sufficient number of Stargates in certain galaxies that if you simply stood in front of a DHD and hit symbols randomly you'd more than likely manage to open a wormhole to somewhere."

Jack screwed up his face in concentration. "So, you go to stellar cartography and put in Nemetae's Stargate address. Since Oota…Uhura…?" he looked at Daniel expectantly.

"Uhutac seems to be the closest I can get." Daniel corrected with a shrug.

"Right, since Uhutac was its neighbour, chances are that there's only going to be one symbol different and if we can get the computer to find it we can go." He looked at her expectantly.

"Exactly right, Colonel –"

"Yes!" Jack clenched his fist and for the first time in a long time, Daniel's eyes gleamed at him with genuinely affectionate amusement as the archaeologist grinned.

"Fortunately, the Ancients grouped Stargate addresses together like we group everyone in Denver with one telephone area code and everyone in Colorado Springs with another area code and everyone in Aspen with yet another," Sam confirmed Jack's hesitant words as they headed to stellar cartography. "The Ancients divided, why, the universe I guess, up into easier chunks. They had quadrants, then galaxies within quadrants, then solar systems within galaxies and down to individual Stargates. All the Stargates in a particular quadrant have similar addresses; some of the stellar cartographers at Nellis can take one look at an address and tell you where it is."

Daniel's eyebrows drew together. "But doesn't that mean that even with only one symbol of difference there could still be a lot of possible Stargates near Nemetae that we end up opening a wormhole to?"

"That's the down side," Carter admitted. "We received a delivery of Orbitals this morning so General Hammond decided that to make the search for Uhutac's address worthwhile, we would send a MALP and UAV with an Orbital through each wormhole we manage to open from the computer's list. The Orbital will stay once we recall the MALP and UAV and will provide valuable surveying data -"

"Whoa, back up a minute." Jack waggled his fingers. "Just how many possible address combinations can the computer come up with if there is only one symbol difference between Nemetae and Orator?"

"Actually, quite a lot, Colonel," Carter winced but didn't correct his mispronunciation of the planet's name. "We can't tell the computer that the first five symbols are the same and just to change the sixth symbol because it might be the third symbol that's different, or the fifth. Besides, I'm only guessing on the one-symbol difference thing –"

"You're assuming the word neighbour means a similar thing in Nemetae to how we use it on earth – a person or place that resides in close proximity to our position, like Tantalus was next-door to Abydos in terms of celestial navigation," Daniel put in. "You're hoping that Oota-Uhura-whatever really is the 'planet next door'?"

"Yes, Daniel, if not…" Carter shrugged. "We found indications that the Nemetae were frequent Stargate users, but I'm hoping their idea of 'Uhura' as a neighbour was meant literally, not in terms of how fast they could get there. Your example of Ernest Littlefield's planet was very apropos; via Stargate, it took us seconds to get to Tantalus even though it's like going from Miami to New York, but our neighbour planet is Mars, which takes us weeks to get to because there is no Stargate on it…that we know of."

"Ouch," muttered Jack as he realised how complicated this plan was shaping up to be.

They entered stellar cartography to find General Hammond waiting for them with the technical guys. Setting off the process, Carter explained to them all, "A lot depends as well on how many Stargates there are in that galaxy. Though the Ancients did favour nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere M- or L- type planets for their Stargate system –"

"Planets such as this one," commented Teal'c as Jack's eyes unfocussed and began to glaze.

" – they did have exceptions to that," Carter continued. "Some galaxies have lots of Stargates, others only dozens, still others just a couple; and of course I'm ignoring Stargates constructed aboard ships or in orbits around planets rather than actually on them."

"Go on, Major," Hammond encouraged when Jack gave his I-don't-understand-this-stuff glare.

Sam shot them all an apologetic look, as if the fact that someone had figured out it was possible to construct a _working_ Stargate on a ship orbiting a world as long as it was close enough to use the planet as a point of origin, (á_ la_ Apophis) was somehow _her_ fault.

Carter explained, "The reason that Earth didn't have aliens tramping through the Antarctica gate daily for millennia like day-trip tourists was because _this_ spiral arm of the Milkyway Galaxy has only half-a-dozen Stargates along it's entire length, including the two on Earth, so unless you knew the address, it's not probable you'd get here by chance. In the galaxies populated by lots of Stargates, it would be very easy to misdial one symbol and end up on the wrong world, but it's unlikely you'd ever misdial enough symbols to open a wormhole up to Earth by accident."

Jack snorted, "Carter, are you saying that Earth is ex-directory?"

She smiled. "Pretty much."

"Proceed Major," ordered Hammond looking amused at the byplay.

Using Cardassia's address as a template, the computer began to search through possible permutations. Within a few seconds one came up flashing green on the screen; through the large flat-screen monitor installed in stellar cartography they could see the same address flashing on the computer monitors in the Gate Control Room as Sergeant Walter Harriman input the address and looked expectantly towards the Stargate. Nothing happened.

"This number is not in service," chimed up Jack suddenly in a passable '1950s' falsetto voice. "Please check and try again."

"Colonel," reproved Hammond softly, though the peculiarly contorted twitching of his lips suggested he was suppressing a grin.

"Sorry, sir," but Jack's already positive mood increased when he heard Daniel suppress a definite snort of laughter. While ever he could still make Danny-boy laugh, all was not lost.

Three more possibilities came up, each time nothing happened. With the fourth, however, the Stargate began to turn and a wormhole opened. The UAV shot through with the Orbital attached at the MALP trundled up the ramp.

"Receiving telemetry," Walter reported from his position in the Gate Room. "UAV and Orbital are go."

Carter had arranged for the signal to be sent from the Gate Room monitors down into stellar cartography on more of the big flat-screen TV monitors. Though they couldn't see it, the Orbital was broadcasting as it detached from the UAV and shot off towards the upper atmosphere to establish a geosynchronous orbit around the planet. The UAV performed a grid search with a ten mile radius from the Stargate, while the MALP panned 180° from its position in front of the Stargate. At first glance, the area resembled the Serengeti Plains – a vast vista of grasslands with big brown creatures resembling buffalo grazing peacefully. There were no signs of artificial construction or that there ever had been. The UAV likewise sent back images of a huge grassy plain populated by herbivores. No energy signatures or indications of sentient life either primitive or advanced.

"Major Carter?" Hammond asked.

"No, sir." She shook her head. "The Ancients generally built the Stargates so they would be conveniently accessible to the native populace of the planet, usually near urban centres. If this were Uhutac-stroke-Oota-stroke-Uhura then there should at least be the vestiges of a major city within a mile or so of its position and the UAV has visibility for hundreds of miles."

Recalling the MALP and UAV, they attached another Orbital and continued. It was another five possibilities before another wormhole engaged.

"Actually this is quite good for us, sir," Carter told the General. "These not-in-service addresses probably mean that there aren't that many other Stargates in that sector."

There was a loud bang that made everyone duck and then whirl to look at the monitors. The UAV was flying through thick fog and smoke and being hit by small projectiles.

"Yee-ouch!" Jack whistled as they saw the MALP's visual relay. Like most Stargates, this one too had been built on a high point of land, which was why it was still viable. The Gate seemed to exist on a crag surrounded by a semi-solidified ocean of lava; steam, magma and small rocks were constantly being expelled with some force in the vicinity. In the far distance to the left, a large volcano had lava, ash, smoke and debris belching out of it. The initial eruption must have been colossal, and certainly nothing would survive in the area for some time.

On two more addresses, the MALP, UAV and Orbital were destroyed as they were prevented from reintegrating on the other side; Sam Carter had created a link so any such addresses would be added her 'cold address' program, which redialled all inaccessible Stargate addresses every three months, though considering how that had turned out the first time they'd tried it…just SG-1's rotten luck to land on the continent that worshipped Nehrfertum as a god rather than the Optrikan side…

On a third address they could only see pitch blackness and the UAV instantly crashed into something and exploded. Turning on the MALP's light they determined that the Stargate appeared to be deep underground in some sort of cave, the Stargate was lopsided as if part of it had sunk lower, and there was rubble everywhere. It looked uncomfortably like the Stargate that had led to Linea's underground prison.

"Major Carter!" Walter exclaimed a few minutes later.

The MALP and UAV had both reintegrated the other side of the latest Stargate address. The UAV had flown up and around the 'back' of the Stargate, transmitting pictures of rolling hills, dotted by flourishing deciduous woodlands and what appeared to be a rather pretty, dainty dappled species of deer grazing contentedly. The MALP's sensors showed what lay directly ahead. Right next to the MALP's extension arm was an obviously intact presumably working DHD. A short flight of what seemed to be white marble steps led to a long, white marble boulevard that stretched along to end in a semi-circular colonnade of marble arches. Through the arch that formed the centre point, they could see what appeared to be a floral centrepiece, with a large fountain surrounded by colourful blooms and verdant foliage.

"The MALP can't get down those steps," General Hammond mused, "Major Carter can you reprogram the UAV to fly over the city?"

"I'll try, sir." Seating herself at the console, she tapped a few keys and the UAV began to change direction.

A loud screech emanated through the speakers as transmitted from the UAV's audio recorders making everyone jump. The display showed huge trees vaguely reminiscent of the eucalypt family; the UAV had flown near one such and they could clearly see a large nest of twigs with dirty-grey bundles moving in it. Abruptly two birds the size of herons but with iridescent emerald plumage launched themselves from it and dive-bombed the UAV, pecking and shrieking.

"Oops!" Carter hastily typed in commands for the UAV to beat a retreat, but the parent birds pursued the craft. "Sergeant Harriman, shut down the gate and see if you can get the MALP to redial Earth, we need to get that UAV back before those birds knock it from the sky!"

"Yes, ma'am," acknowledged the Sergeant, rapidly tapping out a command sequence that made the MALP's extension arm begin to move even as he was shutting down the gate.

They waited keenly; using a MALP's extending robot arm to remote-dial a Stargate address instead of sending a human to the planet was possible, but such an extremely cumbersome procedure it was very rarely done. However, the gate's inner mechanism began to spin and the chevrons glowed after a few minutes. As the wormhole connected they began to receive audio-visual telemetry from the MALP again and heard the loud whine that signified the UAV was still in the air, but when the MALP angled up they could see that both parent birds were dive-bombing the machine; inevitably they would knock it from the sky shortly and probably injure themselves in the process. Quickly Carter typed in a recall command to the UAV.

Pursued by the protective parent birds the UAV hurtled into the open wormhole at greater than usual speed. The Marine squad in the gate room ducked as the UAV shot out of the wormhole and Carter desperately managed to get it flying in a circular trajectory before it hit the windows of the Gate Control Room or worse the Briefing Room directly above. Shrieking madly one of the emerald herons also shot out of the wormhole and began to fly frantically around the gate room.

"Don't kill it!" yelled Daniel into an open mike desperately.

Jack glowered at him at the implication that the Marines would either panic or simply blast at the poor thing, but Daniel returned the glare and even cranked it up a notch. His former good mood evaporating into an overwhelming and unexpected surge of defensive anger, Jack turned his attention to the gate room where Carter had finally managed to land the UAV and cut power – but now they had to get rid of the unwelcome avian.

"Sergeant!" Carter called, but Walter was ahead of her. The instant the heron had followed the UAV he disconnected the incoming wormhole and immediately redialled it as an outgoing wormhole, forced to time the dialling sequence so the wormhole's 'bow wave' didn't disintegrate the madly flying bird in the process.

The 'heron' continued to circle above the UAV for another minute, but apparently deciding that the 'enemy bird' was dead, started to slow down as if preparatory to perching on something. With great presence of mind, one of the Marines crouched near the top of the ramp waited until the bird's flight path took it in front of the reactivated outgoing wormhole and then jumped forward with a yell. Blind instinct made the bird veer away from this new threat and it was promptly sucked back into the wormhole and ejected the other side where it flew off with its mate at great speed with no apparent harm. Jack shot Daniel a look that quite clearly challenged: _See?_

"Sorry, General Hammond." Carter apologised.

Before he could make any comment, Teal'c stated, "The inhabitants of this world appear to be most deficient in the monitoring of their Stargate."

Jack looked back at the MALP's pictures. There was no sign of anything sentient approaching, neither on foot nor in any kind of vehicle. "They've never encountered the Goa'uld, or the planet's already enslaved by one?" he suggested.

"Or perhaps their society is so advanced that they do not _need_ to worry about the arrival of Goa'uld." Teal'c's usually expressionless face managed to look vaguely hopeful.

"Or else it's still way too early," Carter suggested prosaically and pointed at one of the brief pre-homicidal heron images sent back by the UAV of the planet behind the Stargate, where a familiar-looking bright yellow sphere seemed to be pushing up from the horizon. "It seems to be only dawn on that world, sir. I think everyone must still be in bed…"

"You're good to go," decided Hammond, never one to dither, and knowing from past experience that the safest looking planets tended to be the wrong side of lethal, while those ventured to in trepidation, distaste and/or outright worry often proved most useful/friendly/hospitable.

The founding SG teams were by now capable of preparing for a gate trip in about ten seconds even if comatose, trussed up like a Christmas turkey and deep frozen, and none more so than SG-1. Within twenty minutes they were all at the bottom of the ramp with General Hammond watching from the Gate Control Room as the address was redialled. When the wormhole opened, the MALP on the other side automatically sent back the latest telemetry, which showed that the local population were apparently still asleep; though not yet high enough to send any telemetry, the still-travelling Orbital's functioning systems had also detected no threat. The treaties and other literature discovered in Nemetae libraries had given Daniel a head's up on basic linguistic structure – assuming this really _was_ Uhura, as they seemed to have taken to calling it – and though he had no pronunciation key, he could if necessary write down a few basic questions in a format the Uhurans should be able to grasp.

As always when he 'reintegrated' into solid form on the other side of the Stargate, Jack experienced a frisson of something that could be described as a heady mixture of wild excitement and raw terror. However, within a few seconds, the word that suddenly popped into his head was 'bucolic', followed rapidly by 'soporific' and he was completely unsurprised when Carter's scanner showed zero pollution, etc. Jack didn't relax his guard – he remembered all too well the highly advanced, pollution free wonder world that had been annihilated by that giant flying bug that nearly had Teal'c literally buzzing off the mortal coil.

They set off down the steps, which did indeed seem to be a form of marble. Jack wasn't that bothered – he figured there could only be so many types of rock in the universe after all. The long walkway turned out to be a short-span bridge over a wide, beautiful river, whose gently sloping banks sported deep, vibrantly green grass and a stunning profusion of gloriously-coloured flowering plants and shrubs.

"Wow," murmured Daniel, pausing to peer down at the water over the left-hand-side marble balustrade, "talk about retirement fund."

"The water?" asked Carter, also peering down. "It doesn't look drinkable?"

"Actually I'm willing to bet that it's 100 percent pure," Daniel commented in the face of their scepticism as they gazed down at the river, the water of which was a bright, almost glowing blue, streaked with snowy white swirls, like blueberry and vanilla ice-cream. "I spent some time with the Maori in New Zealand on the South Island. Their rivers were like this – exactly like this. It's claimed1 that the South Island is the only country in the world where you can drink directly from the rivers without risking something gruesome taking up residence in your gullet. More importantly, up until just a few years ago, amateur gold-panners were _still_ getting decent sized nuggets out of the rivers – you would not believe the tonnage of gold New Zealand produced."

"Gold?" Jack looked at the unprepossessing water speculatively; anything that looked _less_ likely to harbour wealth beyond the dreams of avarice was hard to imagine.

"By the cubic ton," Daniel confirmed.

They continued along the walkway, walking up the three steps into what appeared to be an arbour of some kind with the fountain as its centre-piece. Again, there was a sort of 'artificial wildness' about it, as though someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look as natural as if you'd come across it on a country stroll.

"Colonel, the Uhurans use crystal technology too," Carter pointed at familiar crystal blocks discreetly hidden under the lip of the fountain's outer wall. "I bet they control things like the height of the water feature –"

"O'Neill!"

Teal'c voice was harsh and grim and the other three hurried through the arbour and out the other side of the colonnade – except that there was no other side. Hidden by the structure and the flourishing foliage, the view of the city proper through the arbour was obscured and of course the Emerald Herons had prevented the UAV making a pass flight, which would have revealed…that there was no city.

His manner as unperturbed as ever, Teal'c stood mere inches from the edge of a chasm at least two miles across at this point, and at least seven miles long and a good mile deep; it was literally a gargantuan gouge in the surface, like someone taking their first spoonful out of a tub of ice-cream. What parts of the city had existed here had been completely obliterated; on the other side of the gorge, clearly visible in such optimum conditions, roads terminated suddenly, what seemed to be apartment blocks had been sheered in half, with scattered debris still discernible on the opposite slope of the rift in places. SG-1 exchanged grim looks of deep disappointment. Even from here it was obvious that the city had suffered a catastrophic military assault; blast damage was apparent and most of the city seemed to be nothing but tumbled ruins.

Jack narrowed his eyes, remembering what Martin Lloyd's planet had looked like, with everything also shattered and twisted. "The question is: did the Uhurans do this to each other, like the Nemetae, or did the snakeheads have a party?"

"I fear the latter, O'Neill." Teal'c had moved and was now down on one knee next to something half hidden under large bushes.

Jack, Sam and Daniel moved closer, not needing any identification of what they were seeing. It was the partial skeletal remains of a large bipedal creature, with large fragments of armour mingled with the bones. What could be nothing other than a staff weapon lay in a twisted heap nearby, and the tiny skeleton of a small snake lay about where a human stomach/abdomen would have been had the being been alive and lying down. It was undoubtedly a Jaffa, or what was left of him, and his larval Goa'uld.

"Anything to ID his System Lord?" Jack enquired with acidic disappointment – the damned snakeheads ruined anything they touched.

"His armour is exceptionally ancient, and of a design I have never before seen any System Lord incorporate." Teal'c frowned as he cautiously examined the remains without touching them. "It is of such antiquity that this Jaffa may even have been Unas rather than human."

"I thought that the Goa'uld had discovered humans by the time they came up with the idea of the Jaffa?" Daniel asked.

Teal'c frowned, "The Goa'uld lie about much of their history; they claimed humans had always been their only hosts. There were rumours that when the Goa'uld first came up with the idea of Jaffa bred to nurture their young, they were still Unas, so any Jaffa would have been Unas. As usual, such stories were forbidden to be mentioned on pain of death."

"Carter?"

"There's no way to tell from a visual inspection of the main skeleton," Carter explained. "The Unas are much taller and heavier built but to the naked eye, their skeleton looks like human bones. The skull of an Unas and a human are distinctively different though – is it there?"

Teal'c nodded. "It appears to be present and intact." Using the butt of his staff weapon, he carefully eased off the remains of the Jaffa helmet to show a large skull that had a massive fracture across it, but which was still intact. Teal'c frowned in obvious consternation, "It is human."

Jack looked at the skull, momentarily unable to tell the difference, but _then _he remembered Daniel's Unas buddy Chaka…and those teeth. The skull of this creature was clearly that of a… "Omnivore!" from somewhere the word just came to him. "Humans are omnivores, Unas are primarily carnivores."

Narrowing his eyes, Teal'c reached into the helmet and brought out a small, oval disc that fitted easily in the palm of his large hand, and which shone a dull buttery yellow in the light against the _café latte_ of his palm. Jack and Sam exchanged astonished glances: this was not merely a dead Jaffa. All Jaffa bore the symbol of the System Lord they served on their foreheads, but these symbols were tattoos, done usually in black ink; only the System Lord's First Prime qualified to have the mark of his master or mistress branded upon his forehead (an agonising procedure) in solid gold, as Teal'c still bore the mark of Apophis. The corpse was no mere cannon-fodder foot soldier, but had been the First Prime of whichever System Lord had done a shoot-and-loot on the Uhurans.

"Daniel, you need to have a look at this," Jack ordered.

"No, actually I think we need to run. I think we need to run very fast, starting now." Daniel was already edging towards the arbour and pointing significantly back towards the ruined city.

Jack looked up and for a moment thought he was back on the bug-planet where Teal'c had so nearly died. Hundreds of flying objects were coming towards them. They looked miniature UAVs, but one immediately striking difference was that these babies clearly had ordnance. The question of whether the Uhurans had guarded their Stargate had just been definitively answered, and not in a good way.

For all his current issues with his friend, Jack could only be grateful that long gone were the days when Danny-boy, 'the civilian', wasted precious seconds of a perilous situation merely staring uncertainly at the incoming threat, or else looking at Jack waiting to see what the Colonel would do to get them out of danger (no pressure, of course!) Taking off like a coursed hare, Daniel bounded up to the DHD and frantically dialled symbols; as soon as he was assured the wormhole had connected, he spun back round and aimed his MP5 above the other three's heads, spraying the approaching attack drones with covering fire.

"Damn it! Crystal technology!" Jack cursed as some sort of energy weapon from one of the drones hit the balustrade of the bridge, sending painful shards of marble into his cheeks. Hadn't he just known this world would have some stupid booby trap that would work with moronic efficiency millennia after there was nobody left around to turn it off, courtesy of damn non-polluting, ten-thousand-year-lasting crystal batteries?

They dove as a synchronised quartet into the wormhole as the horde began to swoop down, spat out by the wormhole and tumbling down the ramp in ungainly and painful rolls, exhorting the SGC to close the gate. Hammond instantly had the iris activated, but one drone shot through the centre gap at high speed a second before it closed; it hit the wall directly underneath the Gate Control Room and dropped to the floor with a loud crack, where it lay inert. As he hauled himself painfully up to his knees – which were too old for this crap – Jack wished he could do likewise.

**_To be continued_…**

© 2005, Catherine D. Stewart

1 My BETA reader, Shallan, an American, states that there is a glacier-fed river up in the Banff National Forest from which she and others were able to drink from directly and use untreated to fill coffee pots.


	3. Chapter 3

_**Disclaimer: **Stargate SG:1 remains the property of Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Greenburg et al. No money is being made from this story. (This story is set before Daniel's "Ascension" as it is my first attempt at a Stargate story and I'm nowhere near confident with the original quartet of characters as it is, never mind trying to get a handle on Jonas Quinn). _

_**Summary: **See Part 1._

_**NB – **This chapter contains a scene which includes the Bible, in particular the Hebrew Scriptures (a.k.a. the Old Testament). I realise this is not everyone's cup of tea, but please bear with it. I needed an ancient but easily accessible record of the Goa'uld being on Earth millennia earlier than previously believed and written in "code", and the Bible lent itself perfectly to be both plausible and detailed. Also, my BETA Shallan points out that Daniel is a book not a PDA kind of guy, but I think the scene is already long enough so am exercising artistic licence rather than extend the narrative any more as "filler" while Daniel goes and gets a Bible, brings it back, etc. _

SARCOPHAGUS 

**Part 3**

**CHAPTER THREE**

"Say again?" Jack was aware of a certain level of antsy edge to his tone and consciously tried to moderate it; he'd had a very bad night, on top of a previously very bad night, and wasn't really in a mood to appreciate the undoubted cosmic irony – or whatever – of the fact that once again General Hammond, SG-1, Dr Fraiser and Major Paul 'Pentagon Pet' Davis were gathered in the Briefing Room at an ungodly hour.

Major Davis looked rabbit-in-the-headlights-like so Sam took pity on him. "I'm sorry Colonel, but the Math just doesn't add up. We've checked every data reading and physical sample we could get from Uhutac and not only does it not answer any questions, it throws up a whole batch of new ones. Firstly, the Uhutac city and, presumably, the rest of the planet was destroyed very approximately 65,000 years ago, which puts it in the same era as the Nemetae extinction or self-annihilation. That's actually also the reason we're not all dead. I've been working on that drone that crashed in the Gate Room – "

"Don't tell me, crystal-powered!" challenged Jack. "Y'know, the Asgard, the Nox, the Goa'uld, don't any of them ever think about turning their toys _off _when they've finished with them?"

"If the destruction of Uhutac was as sudden as it looked, it's unlikely anyone would have time to even think about it," commented Daniel, "besides which, we do the same on Earth – at least in Western society."

"Come again?" Since Daniel had featured heavily in Jack's nightmares of the past two nights, he was a little sharper than he intended.

Daniel shrugged. "The United States of America is responsible for over one-quarter of the annual pollution of this planet, and we contribute thousands of Therms to the Greenhouse Effect every year because ninety-five percent of Americans perpetually leave their appliances on standby – TV, VCR, DVD player, stereo system, PC, printer, kettle, et cetera. They run on electricity, so when the power runs out, the appliance dies, but if they were crystal-powered our TVs could stay on standby for thousands of years – just like the Uhutacis UAVs, except without the ability to fly or nasty weaponry."

Before Jack could retort to this subtle, typical tree-hugger-type complaint, Carter rapidly continued her interrupted explanation, "The drone in the Gate Room was almost out of power; most of its weapons didn't work. If we'd gone to Uhutac just a hundred years ago, we'd never have made it back to the Stargate alive, but now I'd bet most of the drones are on reserve power. In twenty years we could probably stroll through the gate without a qualm."

"You have a recommendation, Major?" General Hammond encouraged.

"Yes, sir. We want – need - to explore the city further, so I suggest we send some sort of _agent provocateur_ through the gate; a MALP with weaponry for instance? We trigger the drone attacks because it won't take long to drain them of power and render them inoperative."

"Very well, we'll try it," General Hammond decided but then frowned thoughtfully. "So did the Jaffa First Prime die in the assault on the city or because of the drones?"

"Without examining the skeleton entire it's impossible for me to be definitive, General," Janet Fraiser put in, "but I'd say the drones killed him, which brings me back to the Math problem again."

"How so, Doctor?"

Janet shrugged helplessly at the General. "The Jaffa was only killed around 50,000 years ago, so whatever destroyed Uhutac, it happened a good 15,000 years before the Goa'uld got anywhere near the planet. The corollary problem to that fact is that the Jaffa is human, not Unas, but the earliest of the System Lords didn't begin to be a dominant galactic power until 30,000 years ago, and as far as we know, they didn't even find Earth until about 25,000 years ago."

"How sure are we that the Jaffa was human?" Major Davis enquired.

"I managed to retrieve enough DNA for a test," Janet responded. "The Jaffa was human and he was from Earth. I sent the sample to a colleague in England with security clearance and familial forensic profiling experience, and the results place the man as Middle or Near Eastern. In fact, there's a strong indication that one…" she checked her notes, "…Professor Mahmoud al-Fahd of the University of Riyadh is a direct descendant of that Jaffa."

"What? So…some early Goa'uld explorer got the jump on the rest of 'em by discovering Earth way before the others and swiped some slaves that were prettier than the Unas?" Jack asked.

"It's possible, sir." Carter shrugged.

"Maybe such early contact by a more primitive Goa'uld accounts for the crude, unsophisticated design on the gold emblem?" mused Daniel

"The design is neither crude, nor unsophisticated, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c contradicted flatly, wearing that troubled expression that meant something profound had happened.

Daniel did that rapid blinking thing that made him look simultaneously serious and scholarly yet also cutely big-wide-eyed and vulnerable like that fluffy baby Barn Owl Jack had rescued when he was thirteen. Looking at the emblem in confusion, Daniel asked, "It's meant to be like that?"

"Indeed," Teal'c inclined his head, reaching out one large finger to almost stroke the emblem, which lay on the table. "The System Lord whose symbol it was has always been believed to be a myth."

Jack gave a derisive snort, "Teal'c, yah mean like the First One we met on Cimmuria courtesy of Thor's Hammer was supposed to be a myth?"

"Yes, O'Neill," Teal'c as ever seemed oblivious to Jack's sarcasm and treated the statement as a serious question. "He was the first ever System Lord of the Goa'uld – the inventor of that idea. The people of the Tau'ri named him Nimrod."

There was a stunned silence as the humans looked again at the gold First Prime disc, with its apparently unimaginative, simple depiction of a tower.

"Whoa! Nimrod, as in the Tower of Babel? Nimrod as in Genesis Chapter 11?" Jack declared and then just glared as everyone shot him startled looks. "Hey, I went to Sunday School. Besides, the hottest girl in the class was Ellie Charteris who was the Reverend's daughter; I swotted on Scripture for hours just to make her smile. Ask me anything – Ten Commandments; The Beatitudes; The Gospels – go on, ask me."

"That is so, O'Neill," Teal'c responded. "Amongst the Jaffa, it was forbidden to speak of the Unas. The Goa'uld knew that if people were to see the creatures the Goa'uld had been forced to take as hosts prior to their discovery of the Tau'ri, then we would know they were not truly gods. However, when a System Lord was feeling benevolent, he or she would often boast to their Jaffa and slaves of being greater than the First Lord, and would tell us stories of Nimrod's exploits, even though none of them really believed he ever existed."

Major Davis cleared his throat nervously, "Er, I'm not a theological scholar but my grandfather was a Methodist minister, I mean, didn't Nimrod, or at least the human the bible calls Nimrod, live long before Ra?"

"Yes, he did!" Having whipped out his handheld computer, which he used for back-up facts away from his beloved books as Teal'c was speaking, Daniel was now peering at the small screen intently. "The ancient Egyptian Pharaohs – the human ones – were as arrogant as their Goa'uld predecessors. They lied like rugs so it's hard to build an accurate chronology of when Egypt first rose to prominence as a World Power of the era post-Ra, but Nimrod _did _pre-date Egypt…"

They waited while he tapped away with his stylus and squinted at the screen. Finally Daniel said, "Genesis has the Global Flood starting on approximately…November 17th 2370 B.C., when Noah was over 500 years old. According to Genesis Nimrod was a great-grandson of Noah, through Noah's son Ham and grandson Cush. According to the bible, another of Noah's great-grandsons, Eber, was a contemporary of Nimrod. Genesis gives Eber's life span as 2303 B.C. – 1839 B.C, during which Nimrod tried to build the Tower of Babel and so God confused the languages of humanity from one universal tongue to many in order to thwart him."

"What happened to Nimrod?" General Hammond asked.

"The bible doesn't say, Nimrod just disappears from the narrative after the Tower of Babel debacle, but Jewish historical tradition has it that Nimrod invaded the land of Asshur, which belonged to Noah's grandson by his favourite son Shem, and that Nimrod was killed by Shem. Shem is believed to be the same guy as Melchizedek, priest-king of Salem, which later became Jerusalem. In Hebrew Nimrod actually means Rebel or Great Rebel – he was called a 'mighty hunter _in opposition to God_,' which is a pretty suicidal stance for a mere human to take when you think about it, less than a century after God had come within an inch of annihilating the planet." Daniel reeled off.

"So, Shem killed Nimrod before he could tell other Goa'uld about Earth and it took a while for the rest of them to find us?" Sam mused.

"Daaahnyhal," drawled Jack slowly, "Come on, spit it out, you'll feel better."

"What?" Daniel twitched, startled.

Jack rolled his eyes. "I know that look. It's the same look you always get when you've either just had an epiphany…or stubbed your toe."

"Yes…I can't understand why I didn't see…it's so obvious…it's all there, and I just dismissed it…" Daniel began to stammer.

"Daniel!" Jack barked. "Self-flagellate later, explain now – preferably in words of few syllables."

"Colonel!" Hammond's quiet but sharp tone told Jack he was skating close to the edge of 'too far' and Jack, feeling guilty, subsided.

Daniel ran his hand through his hair. "I've never brought it up before now because I have nothing to prove my theory but…it all goes back to the Ancients. Assuming they were from Earth, they _apparently_ left because there was some sort of plague, but left behind other humans, which on the face of it seems decidedly uncharitable, not to say downright cowardly, but after meeting Oma Desala on Kheb…I started to think that maybe they left normal humans because they knew we were _immune_ to the plague?"

"How do you hypothesise immunity to a plague for the non-Ancient population? They would have been too primitive to –" Janet began.

"Ah!" Daniel raised a hand. "That's it. I don't think they were. We've always viewed the Ancients as like the Asgard and the rest of the non-Ancient humans on Earth at the same time like Neanderthals. I think that the relationship was much closer to that of the Chinese and European peasants."

"Explain?" Teal'c requested.

"In 1473 Englishman William Caxton began printing books on his invention, the printing press; but Caxton _reinvented_ the press. The Chinese had done it 1500 years earlier. In 1066, the year William the Conqueror crossed from Normandy to Britain, if a Saxon or Norman peasant wanted to read something, they had to pay a priest to do it for them. If a Chinese peasant wanted to read something he went to a bookshop and bought a book, but in ninety-percent of other ways, the European peasant and the Chinese peasant were at the same stage – it was only their technology that set them apart."

"And this relates to immunity how?" Jack asked, curious despite himself. He had to admit that though much of what Daniel usually said was incomprehensible, it was interesting, unlike Sam who was just incomprehensible.

"Maybe this plague affecting the Ancients only affected technologically advanced Earth cultures, and the more primitive societies were immune because they didn't have all the snazzy gadgets," Daniel suggested.

"That's rather far-fetched, Doctor," Hammond began.

"Excuse me, Sir, but it may not be," Janet Fraiser interjected respectfully but suddenly. "Put a native New Yorker and a Peruvian deep-jungle tribesman side by side and I guarantee the New Yorker will probably live longer, but that's not because he's necessarily _healthier_ – in fact probably the opposite. He'll live because he's got access to broader range of nutritional minerals and advanced medical intervention; he may well be less healthy _generally_ than the tribesman.

"How so?" Hammond didn't look convinced; Jack shared the feeling.

"There's even a 20th Century proof of the theory. Geologist Clair Patterson spent most of his life campaigning to get lead removed from gasoline after discovering that before 1923 Earth had zero atmospheric lead and post-1923 we were swimming in the stuff. An average American living now – including all of us sat here - were born with over 600 times more lead in his or her body than our grandparents who were born in 1900, or 1922; in comparison, the jungle tribesman is far healthier and that's just the start. Amongst the biggest killers of human beings are heart disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and AIDS," Janet reeled off.

General Hammond nodded sombrely. His long-deceased and dearly loved wife had died of ovarian cancer, dubbed all-too accurately the 'silent killer' because in many cases, by the time the woman began to experience any sort of real or persistent pain, the disease was already terminal. Their son James, the youngest of their three children, had been only twelve at the time; Emma had been fifteen, and Amelia barely twenty.

"Almost all of those illnesses are at their greatest levels in Western society and that doesn't even count the minor things. Rheumatism, arthritis, chronic allergies, asthma, eczema, migraines, hayfever, STDs, Repetitive Strain Injury…" Janet ticked off the litany on her fingers as she enumerated them. "You name the health complaints of your choice and you're ten times _more_ likely to find them lurking in a Seattle fitness fanatic than a South American jungle tribesman. Even a human's ability to reproduce is adversely affected if he or she lives in a developed nation as opposed to a Third World country. In Western countries over the past fifty years both the quantity and quality of male sperm has dropped by nearly seventy-percent of what it was pre-World War I. If every family in the West decided they wanted to go back to the Victorian days of having ten kids per family then people owning fertility clinics would become the new Bill Gates; all of the world's fertility clinics are based in _developed_ nations –"

Jack winced, not at what she said, but at painful memory. He and Sarah had never intended Charlie to be an only child. Indeed, they had agonised for some time before christening him with both grandfathers' names – Tyler Charles O'Neill – since their original plan to name the second son after the initially non-chosen grandfather foundered against their wish to avoid appearing to prefer one man over the other (plus a desire for the second child to be a girl).

But it had just hadn't seemed to happen. By the time Charlie reached his eighth birthday and was _still _an only child, they had more or less decided to ask for a referral to a fertility clinic if Sarah wasn't pregnant with, hopefully, Brianna Judith O'Neill by the time Charlie was nine. Of course, a month later Charlie had killed himself with his dad's own gun, and Jack's life went down the toilet for a very long time…He tuned back in to find that Janet was on a roll.

"…We strain our eyes looking at computer and TV screens, ruin our postures and our figures sitting at desks eight hours a day. We eat food packed full of a cocktail of chemical preservatives, fat, sugar and salt and we breathe recycled air in offices. The reason why most Americans are almost always perpetually suffering from colds is because they walk out of a refrigerated air-conditioned office into a hot parking lot and their bodies have no time to adjust from going from the North Pole to the Maldives –"

"We get it!" Jack interjected, recognising Janet's woman-on-a-soap-box demeanour. "So we have – _possibly_ – some Ancient 'plague' that was their version of high cholesterol? Daniel, if you can tie _that_ in with the Goa'uld coming to Earth, I'll buy you lunch and dinner."

Daniel cleared his throat. "Basically, I think the Goa'uld sent off human development at a tangent in the same way the Naqahdah meteorite led to some beings on their home world becoming the Goa'uld and those not affected by it developing at a normal rate in what are now the Unas – a primitive pre-technological society."

"In what way?" Major Davis asked, clearly fascinated by it all.

Concentrating intently Daniel explained, "I think that after the Ancients left Earth, for whatever reason they chose or were forced to go, the other humans co-operated with each other to learn about the technology left behind and utilise it. If we assume that until the Tower of Babel, all humans really were monolingual, there's very little they couldn't accomplish in a relatively short space of time. Unfortunately for them they were like the Americans who created the A-bomb – too busy trying to see whether they could to take a moment to think about whether they should and too arrogant to really have that much power that soon. If they never thought to give the Antarctica Stargate an iris or never learned to utilise any that the Ancients incorporated, they would have been helpless to stop undesirables following them back to Earth through it, like the Reetu followed us. That's probably how the first Goa'uld got to Earth, since we are, like Jack said, ex-directory."

"What tangent did the Goa'uld take us off at?" General Hammond enquired.

"Nationalism, for a start," Daniel shrugged. "The Goa'uld compete with one another, faction against faction. I think the Goa'uld began the separation of humanity into the nation-states we have today, and the competition just continued even after we got rid of the Goa'uld themselves. The confusing of languages at Babel would just have exacerbated that separation and the subsequent damage it's caused."

"What's wrong with being proud of being an American?" Jack stiffened in outrage, prepared to rebut another one of Daniel's anti-U.S. military speeches.

"Nothing, Jack," Daniel snapped, his tone clearly showing he was losing patience, "what I'm _saying_ is that the lack of international co-operation caused by _excessive_ patriotism and nationalistic fervour has hindered humanity's technological advancement way beyond the Goa'uld's wildest dreams."

Carter cleared her throat as General Hammond began to frown ominously at this perceived slur. "I think I understand what Daniel means, Sir. It's like the Prometheus – that ship is only a prototype, but it's actually way more advanced that anything even the Asgard have because it was built co-operatively by several governments using technology we back-engineered from over a dozen different cultures."

Jack snorted, "Carter, you've just said that a ship we cobbled together from a dozen different worlds' leftovers is superior to the Asgard. Don't make me laugh."

"Sir, that's my point," Carter persisted. "The Prometheus is pretty indestructible. The shields are based on Goa'uld technology, which is primarily designed to stop _other _Goa'uld Motherships, so the Goa'uld can't penetrate our shields, but the Asgard could. The Prometheus' weapons systems are based on Asgard and Tollan and Goa'uld technology, which means if one gets knocked out the others are still operative. The cloaking system the ship uses is Nox. We've even used technology from an unknown civilisation - what we_ think _to be Furling technology - as a basis for gravity and life support systems even though we know nothing about them and probably wouldn't recognise a Furling if we fell over one. If the _Prometheus_ is attacked by the Goa'uld, not all systems will be knocked out, same if the Asgard were to attack us. The Prometheus is like a mongrel dog that can pretty much run rings about pure bred types because nobody's got one thing that will disable everything the Prometheus has got."

"The Prometheus is a hybrid, a sort of mechanical bastard, which is its secret weapon." Janet Fraiser finished off Sam's earnest explanation, "It's why the illegitimate children of kings and noblemen were often more intelligent, courageous, talented and better looking than their legitimate counterparts. The king and queen or the duke and duchess were usually already blood relations to a greater rather than lesser degree, which only accentuated genetic defects; the king's peasant mistress or the duchess's stable hand provided a much-needed infusion of new DNA to reinvigorate the bloodline. It's common knowledge that at least one of France's most able and celebrated kings was _not_ the son of the previous king."

"It's what I mean with how Earth should have been, probably would have developed after the Ancients left _if _the Goa'uld hadn't turned up," Daniel pointed out. "Think of the possibilities if ancient cultures had been co-operative instead of confrontational. Leonardo da Vinci came within a hair's breadth of bringing about the Industrial Revolution 250 years before an Englishman named Abraham Darby did it in the 1750s. If da Vinci had known about the blast furnace, printing press, saltpetre, etc., etc., all of which the Chinese had had for over a millennium, he would have had a viable fuel source for his heavier-than-air flying machine and we could have had manned aerial flight in 1603 instead of 1903. If the Industrial Revolution had happened in the 16th Century we could have had a man on the moon in 1769 not 1969. But everyone kept their secrets to themselves, and we ended up a fractured, mutually suspicious world torn apart by internecine wars that left us totally vulnerable to the Goa'uld. In the words of Quark from _Deep Space Nine_: 'You people irradiate your own planet?'"

In the face of Daniel's evident passion – and too many all-too-correct statements – Jack remained silent. He'd never been one for history – the past couldn't be changed, so why dwell on it? – but had to admit that Daniel had a valid point. All for want of communication between just two countries, China and Italy, never mind several, the moon landing had been delayed by two centuries.

"In the Book of Genesis," Teal'c stated suddenly, "it claims that this world was truly a paradise until the woman of the Tau'ri, Eve, was deceived by the Devil that is described therein –"

"As an evil _snake_ that _talked_." Daniel slapped his palm against his forehead. "You see? I'm so stupid I should shoot myself. Thank you Teal'c."

"We don't expect you to be omniscient, Dr Jackson." Hammond soothed, "But isn't it a bit of a stretch to start reading Goa'uld into the Garden of Eden?"

Daniel shook his head. "In some ways I wish it were, but it fits too well, even the snake's choice of victim. Genesis claims that Adam had been around the block a time or two before Eve was created. When Hathor came to the SGC, she had a choice between Jack, me and you, General, but she focussed on me because I was the least militarily experienced and therefore most vulnerable to what she was doing. Ditto when Nirrti attacked Hanka – she left behind not a man or even a woman, but a child as her Trojan Horse. It's the same reason why human conmen target elderly pensioners and not Wall Street Bankers – the target of choice is always the least experienced person you can find."

General Hammond raised an eyebrow, "Dr Jackson, are you saying that we should start taking Genesis literally? The Garden of Eden and the global Flood; the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages? Even the life spans of the antediluvian patriarchs? The actual existence of God Himself?"

"In a way sir, yes," Daniel acknowledged. "First, we have what sounds like a Goa'uld in the Garden of Eden. When God expelled the humans from paradise, he barred the way back in by means of a barrier – a continually turning sword and two _angels_. Remember on Kheb when Oma Desala took Shifu – didn't her brilliant white glow remind anyone of anything?"

"And Orlan, on 636, he Ascended to save me and Colonel Reynolds from the weapon," Sam put in softly.

"The angels were Ancients, the sword some sort of energy weapon or even an iris of some kind across the road in." Major Davis straightened up as he thought about it. "It has been said that the Garden of Eden was actually a valley between two mountain ranges or an isolated plateau that could well have had only one way in or out."

"Which would make two Ancients and an energy weapon pretty effective, I'll grant you," Jack conceded, "but Nimrod. I mean, just one guy…"

"One is all it takes." Daniel countered, "A man who was crucified two thousand years ago in a backwater of the Roman Empire proved that even before you start on about Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Julius Caesar and so forth. Besides, Nimrod's job was made a lot easier by the fact that he didn't have to establish relations with a dozen different nations and learn a dozen different languages to get his little tower building project under way. Genesis says that all the earth continued to be one people with one tongue."

Major Davis cleared his throat again. "I was just thinking – Nimrod may not have had much opposition from his host. I know we think of hosts as helpless victims of Goa'uld enslavement, and most of them are, like Sha're and Tanith's host Hebron and even Apophis' host, but Hitler unfortunately wasn't that much of an anomaly – the only difference is he lived in an era where he could affect billions of people, whereas Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun could only affect thousands or hundreds. From what I remember, Genesis seems to indicate that Nimrod the human wasn't exactly that nice a guy to start off with. The Goa'uld may have lucked out and snagged a host who was _already_ as power-crazed and psychopathic as it was."

Jack felt his headache start up again, particularly at the sudden, ghastly image of someone already the wrong side of psychotic, like Adolf Hitler, ending up being chosen as a host by such as Apophis, or this new guy, Anubis. "So, Goa'uld the First somehow makes it to Earth, presumably through the Antarctic Stargate, and finds human beings, a species – "

"Beauteous in form; fearless in action; wise of intellect," Teal'c reeled off with sudden poetry. He raised an eyebrow as they stared at him and said, "The words were coined by an ancient System Lord named Nebo; the Goa'uld often used such flattery upon their intended victims to make them feel especially chosen by the Gods to be the vessel of their essence."

"A species a hell of a lot prettier than the Unas," Jack ploughed on relentlessly ignoring Daniel's not-quite _sotto voce_ comment that Nebo was an ancient Babylonian god. "He makes his way to Eden, and tells Eve…ah- ah- wait for it!" He chastised as Major Davis, Daniel and Teal'c all opened their mouths, "…that God is deceiving her and lying to her. He dangles the opportunity for her to become a goddess in her own right if she just bites the nice apple and the little twit believes him. Result: hit the road Adam & Eve and don't you come back no more, no more. Here's my problem – you're saying that some being had the power to order Ancients around, viz. the two that got lumbered with the job of guarding the gates to Paradise for a millennium until the Flood destroyed the whole kit and caboodle?"

"Why not?" Daniel shrugged with a definite attitude of provocative challenge in his tone.

"Dan_iel- _"

"Jack. Come on, all the sentient beings that we've encountered through the Stargate and you cannot believe in an entity like that? I know we tend to view the Ancients through rose-tinted glasses because, well, we mostly likely are their younger siblings in a way, but they weren't omniscient or omnipotent. The fact that they seemingly couldn't cure some plague that ended up driving them from Earth _proves_ that."

"So?" Jack challenged snippily.

Daniel visibly hung on to his temper. "_Think_ about it: the Ancients, our 'Chinese peasants' turn tail and abscond due to this presumed plague so you –a passing benevolent entity – decide to stick around and make a little bit of Terra Firma nice for the locals left behind, the 'European peasants'. They're very appreciative for the work you do for them so they call you 'God'."

"Continue, Daniel Jackson," Teal'c intoned when Daniel paused for breath, that intent focus on his face indicative of his deep interest.

Daniel fidgeted nervously but went on, "Everything's going hunky dory when this little snake bastard shows up and starts messing around with the whole deal. The humans aren't up to Ancient technology levels yet but you can't let the thing access any of your technology so your only option is to co-opt a couple of Ancients and bar _all_ humans from getting in to where the good stuff's kept…"

Jack waggled his fingers to attract attention, "But in Genesis the whole expulsion from Eden deal dragged on for centuries?" His _so explain that_ went unsaid but clearly audible, earning him another not-hidden glower from General Hammond.

Daniel twitched in reaction, but said confidently, "Yes, but even if you get a couple of Ancients to guard the route back into Eden, all you're doing is merely delaying the inevitable. Fifteen hundred years later and the snake's managed to screw things up so bad, you have to start again. Drowning the planet has the beneficial side effect of locking that pesky Antarctic Stargate under several miles of ice out of the way of meddlers. You save the nicest people left on the planet and wipe the slate clean."

"Unfortunately, the snake makes it too?" Major Davis put in softly.

Daniel nodded, "…Or, more likely, escaped the planet for the duration of the Deluge before the Stargate was deep-frozen and returned by spaceship later – possibly the period when his little jaunt to Uhutac lost him his First Prime. Snakehead comes back, finds in 'Nimrod' a host who's as not-nice as he is, and comes up with the Tower of Babel to unify all humanity as his slaves. Since the entity – God – promised Noah he wouldn't ever deluge the world again, He comes up with an even better plan – those who can't communicate can't collaborate, so _voila_ he makes humans multi-lingual. 'Nimrod' either flees the Earth again or else gets killed by Shem…" Daniel wound down.

Hammond turned to Teal'c. "Could just one Goa'uld have survived from Eden to Noah, especially as if I'm understanding all this correctly, the Goa'uld as a species hadn't discovered the sarcophagus technology at this point, apart from possibly the one on Earth masquerading as Nimrod?"

"It is unlikely," conceded Teal'c reluctantly, "the immense danger of such frequent changes of host –"

"No, wait." Janet Fraiser held up her hand. "Daniel, have you got Genesis on your handheld?"

"Yes?" Daniel held it out obediently.

"Dr Fraiser?" Hammond questioned.

"Teal'c, isn't it true that the Goa'uld symbiote's natural life span is actually the natural life span of the host?" she asked.

"Indeed," Teal'c inclined his head. "The Goa'uld queen requires DNA from the males of the intended host species to produce viable larvae, and their natural life span automatically becomes the life span of the resultant larvae."

"Right, Daniel, do you know how long, to the year, the gap was between Eve in the Garden of Eden to the supposed Great Flood?"

Daniel frowned. "It's stored in the handheld, the second icon along the top, the drop-down menu; go to Biblical Chronology."

Janet tapped the screen with the stylus as everyone craned to look. "Here, creation of Adam in the October of 4026 B.C., great flood began approximately 17th November 2370 B.C, which is a period of…"

"One-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-six-years, exactly," Sam blurted out.

"Meaning?" Jack demanded irascibly.

"Here!" clearing her throat, Janet read aloud, "Genesis 5:5: all the years of Adam amounted to 930 years."

Jack wasn't _that_ slow. "So if Adam's natural life span was nearly a millennium and the Nimrod-Goa'uld used _him_ as a host, it wouldn't need a sarcophagus – especially if it kept him healthy. Four-oh-two-six minus nine-three-oh leaves…Carter…?"

"The year 3096 B.C., sir…" Carter did another mental calculation, "Which was only 726 years before the flood."

"Genesis states that Methuselah lived to be 969 – he died only five months before the flood started – so in theory, the Goa'uld of Eden could have had to change host only _once_ in the period between 4026 and 2370 B.C." Janet concluded.

"The Goa'uld would most likely have survived such a situation," Teal'c admitted.

Janet looked at General Hammond. "Sir it is possible, maybe even probable. As a scientist, I'm a sceptic on religious matters, but humans once having a naturally much longer life span than now would certainly solve the Maturity Conundrum."

"The what of which?" General Hammond imitated Daniel's baffled rapid blinking.

Janet shrugged. "All species mature at a rate that is proportional to their natural longevity. Mayflies go from birth to adulthood in fifteen minutes. The Roughy fish of New Zealand lives for two hundred years and breeds only once every sixty or seventy years. Every species that is, _except_ for human beings. A human is capable of biological reproduction on average about the age of twelve, which is actually very bad for us, because a human being doesn't reach full sexual, mental and emotional maturity until about the age of thirty-five."

"Daniel and Carter don't look like kids to me," Jack muttered, eyeing the youngest two people in the room askance.

Janet ignored him. "In the New Testament, I forget where, St Paul refers to Timothy as a youth even though the man was about thirty-one at the time. Human biologists have always skirted the question of how St Paul knew a biological fact that we didn't discover until the 20th Century. I have to admit the one thing that always intrigued me about my own Sunday School classes were the longevity of the antediluvian patriarchs. Somewhere in Psalms I think it says that the average human life span is seventy years or eighty with special mightiness – "

"Psalm 90, verse 10, Dr Fraiser."

"Thank you, Teal'c. The thing is, it's detrimental not beneficial for a species to take half it's life span to reach fully mature adulthood, and humans are the only species we've ever encountered that has that problem," Janet explained. "Now, if humans at one time _naturally _had a life span that measured in centuries rather than decades, 35 years instantly becomes irrelevant. What's more, it meant the Goa'uld didn't need the sarcophagus in the way they do now. With a lifetime of only 70 or 80 years, when the host gets to about 50, the Goa'uld has to start using a sarcophagus every 5 years or so minimum in order to maintain the host's body, but if the host naturally lives to 900, there is no need to resort to a sarcophagus until you reach the 700s or even 800s."

"Genesis states that before the Flood, the Earth had some sort of global water canopy high in the atmosphere. It presumably made the entire planet temperate enough for Antarctica to be a flourishing sub-tropical landmass. After the flood, the human life span began to plummet, maybe the canopy kept out harmful solar emissions?" Daniel began to speculate.

"But what did that mean in real terms for the Nimrod-Goa'uld on Earth?" General Hammond persisted.

"Well, for a start, sir, a lot less violence." Janet explained, "Remember, the sarcophagus is an _enormous _factor in how evil the Goa'uld now are; indeed as we now know it is actually the single main factor that made them that way. A human with a life span of a century can use a sarcophagus maybe a dozen or so times in his or her life and suffer little adverse effect so long as they leave a big enough gap between usage, but the sarcophagus was designed to be used by a species with a much greater mass and a totally different physiology than the Goa'uld."

Jack curled his lip. "Doesn't seem to have bothered the snakes that much, considering they rule oh, half the known galaxy."

"Actually Colonel, it has bothered them, a great deal," Janet contradicted. "Let me illustrate: a human – especially a healthy human – using the sarcophagus _regularly_ is like someone who smokes marijuana – it can take weeks or even months for the damage to begin to show, depending on how frequently they use it or how long a gap they leave between each fix. But for a Goa'uld the first time they use the sarcophagus to them it's like crack cocaine – instantly addictive, instantly massive in damage. The sarcophagus will heal a Goa'uld and it will even resurrect them just like any other living creature you put in one, but it pretty much messes up everything else. Daniel's excavations have shown that the Goa'uld are related to the Unas by a common ancestor, so even without the sarcophagus they would probably be an aggressive, dominant species, _but_," she paused a beat for emphasis, "it is their addicted, constant _use_ of the sarcophagus that drives that aggression to psychopathic extreme in the Goa'uld. If Nimrod back in 2370 B.C. or whatever didn't have access to one and indeed, had never used one, he may have been just a bad apple amongst the Goa'uld, but he wouldn't have been the out-and-out nut jobs that the sarcophagus turned Ra, Apophis, Heru-Ur, Sokar, Cronos, Osiris, Isis, et cetera, into."

"Dr Jackson, is there any chance that Nimrod could still be on Earth, hiding somewhere like Hathor and Seth, or even imprisoned in stasis like Isis and Osiris were?" General Hammond asked.

"Anything's possible, but it's not likely," Daniel reassured him. "From what Teal'c's said, Goa'uld tradition has it that Nimrod has been dead for eons; I'd imagine that the Semitic tradition of Shem having killed Nimrod would be right – he probably got the man _and _the symbiote. The bible speaks of Shem being not only Noah's favourite son but also the priest-king of God; so that 'benevolent entity' may have favoured him with weaponry advanced enough to kill Nimrod. Noah, Shem and the immediate family may even have been Ancients themselves, to be honest, or at least have strong reserves of Ancient blood in their veins."

"The Nephilim," said Major Davis suddenly, making them turn towards him. He flushed as Jack raised both eyebrows sardonically. "Sorry, thinking aloud. According to Genesis some 'angels' intermarried with normal humans and produced the Nephilim, er…"

"'The mighty ones who were of old,'" Teal'c quoted, looking as if he relished the description, "'the men of fame.'"

"…Yes." Major Davis' face went an even deeper shade of beetroot. "I may be completely wrong but that sounds to me pretty much like a description of a whole bunch of Harsesis children, or at least rather the Ancient-human version of the Goa'uld-human hybrids."

Sam cleared her throat hesitantly as she had silently indicated to Janet to borrow Daniel's handheld and read quickly through the text. "General, I think Noah and his family _had_ to have access to some pretty advanced knowledge. Even with the instructions 'God' gave him for building the ark, I doubt the man woke up one morning with a neat architectural blueprint in his head. To build the Flood Ark of Genesis you would need knowledge of three-dimensional design, load-bearing walls and barometric pressure differentials on a massive scale, plus thousands of other things I can think of on spec. At the very least, the family must have had _some _conversations with the Angels-stroke-Ancients guarding the way into Eden to get some insight."

"Next you'll be telling me they used power-tools to build the thing," muttered Jack, but not as under his breath as he'd thought.

Sam nodded. "Actually Colonel, maybe they did. After all there's the lighting issue."

"Lighting?" Hammond queried in confusion.

Carter nodded and gestured at the handheld. "Janet's Sunday School favourite was the ages of the pre-Flood people, mine was the mechanics of it all. For instance, as described in Genesis, Noah was basically building a giant shoe box with a lid – a roof. So it would have been very dark inside. Plus he built the ark out of wood, coated it with tar, and filled it first with straw and then _methane _producing animals. I don't about you, but I wouldn't have taken a naked flame anywhere near it. If Noah was some caveman hick using wall-torches for light, how did he and his family survive for…" she checked the handheld… "over a year inside the world's worst firetrap without burning it down around them?"

"Okay, okay." Jack raised a hand. "I've got to admit, General, that it all sounds pretty, well, plausible but then again, surely it could all just be our wishful interpretation. I mean come on, if Eve was targeted by a Goa'uld, why didn't Genesis just come right out and say so?"

"Because Moses knew it wouldn't have meant anything to his readers," Daniel replied flatly. "For example, how did you get to be an Air Force Colonel, Jack?"

There was a momentary but intensely charged silence as Jack and Daniel locked eyes down the length of the table; even being wilfully obtuse Jack could feel the sting of the barb in the question, but the way General Hammond merely sat next to him at the head of the table without intervening indicated that the General wasn't pleased with Jack's current attitude and was willing to allow Daniel some leeway.

"I worked my way up the ranks, from when I joined out of High School." Jack struggled to keep his tone neutral.

However, having metaphorically bared his teeth, Daniel seemed content to let it drop. "Exactly. When you signed up the sergeant didn't just toss you an MP5 and say: "'Have fun!'" - or at least I sincerely hope not. It took time and training. Likewise Sam didn't just wake up one morning and dive easily into the _Tao of Physics_ without learning about the basics such as Pi or E mc2 first and I'm sure Teal'c didn't magically go from being the new kid on the block to First Prime in a day."

"How does that relate to the way Genesis was written, Dr Jackson?" Major Davis, possibly seeking to ease the simmering tension between Jack and Daniel, hastened to ask.

"The same principle applies to the writing of The Pentateuch, the first five Biblical books, which is basically a human history from 4026 B.C. to the founding of the Israelite nation in 1473 B.C. Moses was raised in the Pharaoh's household, educated in as Genesis puts it, 'all the wisdom of the Egyptians' to the extent that he became powerful in 'words and deeds'. It is tradition that Moses was the Egyptian prince who led a great military campaign into Ethiopia some time between 1573 to 1553 B.C." Daniel explained, "Basically, Moses, had what equated to the best higher education the world had to offer at the time -"

"Ah hah!" Jack cut in, determined to keep Daniel out of 'lecture mode'. "But the rest of the Jews were high school dropouts?"

"In comparison, yes, exactly right," Daniel admitted, though he looked rather too surprised at Jack's ability to be that insightful, "Although it certainly wasn't as big a gap as the Chinese versus European peasants. We know the Israelites as they called themselves then had some level of literacy before they entered Egypt in the 1660s B.C. because they already had prophecies requiring mathematical knowledge and were recording the tribal genealogies. But they were like college Freshmen to Moses' Dean of the University."

Sam looked sceptical. "But would Moses have had access to information regarding what the Goa'uld and the Ancients really were?"

"I'd say definitely," Daniel claimed. "The Egyptians were the first World Power probably because they overthrew Ra, which in turn triggered humans driving most of the other Goa'uld from Earth, and as Royalty, Moses would have had complete access to the archives and historical documents beyond the reach of the general populace that are now gone. Virtually every historian of antiquity lists several books that now non-existent. The Bible itself mentions at least two – the 'Book of the Wars of Jehovah' and the 'Book of Jashar' – neither of which outlasted the burning of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 607 B.C. Like I tried to explain when Amaroqah's mate held me captive, the sheer amount of knowledge that has been lost is colossal, and we have no idea how many of the earliest written texts explicitly or implicitly mentioned the Goa'uld or the Ancients or the Stargate. Over two thirds of Egypt's literary heritage was destroyed when Thebes was sacked in 664 B.C. It's estimated that half a million texts were lost when the Romans burned Carthage and over a million at least when the Patriarch Cyril instigated the murder of Hypatia and the burning of the Library of Alexandria -"

Jack opened his mouth, but forbore to comment when Daniel abruptly seemed to start listening to himself and took a deep breath and visibly reined in his indignant rant against the ancient barbarians who had the idiocy to wilfully destroy knowledge.

Janet Fraiser hastily stepped in. "If I may, Daniel, Moses may also have had verbal accounts to link with what he learned at 'university' for want of a better word. According to the dates on Daniel's handheld, Moses was born only 64 years after the death of the Egyptian Prime Minister Joseph, who was his great-great-uncle. According to biblical tradition, Shem outlived many of his own descendents including Eber the King of Ebla, well into Abraham's life time. He had first hand knowledge of the Ancients and the Goa'uld and I can't see him _not _bothering to mention to his family to watch out for people with glowing eyes."

Daniel nodded, acknowledging her idea as he went on in a more moderate tone, "Moses needed a way to convey his knowledge to his Hebrew people in a manner they understood. If he'd just translated the original and probably very verbose wording it would be like me handing Jack one of Sam's quantum physics textbooks and expecting him to understand it enough to brief NASA scientists the next day. There was also the fact that the Israelites wouldn't want to be hauling about tonnes of books as they headed for the Promised Land. Moses had to make his narrative simple but concise, which is probably why he tells us that Noah built the Ark, but doesn't mention how he lit the interior; but Moses also had to make his writing clear enough leave as many clues as possible to what he was _really _trying to say. A few verses in Genesis about an 'evil talking serpent' was just right for the Israelites' level of literacy while at the same time being sufficient to make anyone with any real knowledge of the Goa'uld go: _whoa!_"

"It is possible that Moses' knowledge of the Goa'uld was shared and continued by a small number of individuals within the Israelite nation for many centuries," Major Davis, encouraged by how well his comments had been received, dared to venture. "For instance, Revelation was written in 96 A.D. by St. John, the last Apostle, just over 1500 years after Moses wrote Genesis. My grandfather's favourite scripture was Revelation 12: 7-9, where war broke out in heaven, and 'down the…original serpent, the one called Devil and Satan…was hurled…to Earth'. If you assume John knew that the serpent in Eden was a Goa'uld, those verses seem to be a warning to those 'in the know' that there were still some Goa'uld on earth masquerading as humans."

"Seth and Hathor," Teal'c stated, "and also Osiris and Isis imprisoned in the stasis jars and maybe other Goa'uld we do not yet know of still hiding on this world."

"There are other examples too," Daniel expanded. "Saint John again said that we should not be like Cain who originated with the wicked one and who murdered his brother, righteous Abel. John's statement that Cain originated with the Devil may have been a clue that Cain was the Goa'uld's previous host before it jumped to Nimrod. Then there's the book of Ezekiel – for a long time some scholars have seriously considered that the Divine Chariot described in Ezekiel Chapters 1 and 2 is actually a space ship. The four wheels that could turn in any direction could be trying to indicate Stargates. In Ezekiel Chapters 41-43 God takes Ezekiel in vision to a great temple and has him measure it – but it's far too huge for any structure on Earth –"

"But it may fit the giant pyramid where your grandfather Dr Ballard is studying the Mayan aliens?" Sam suggested.

"Exactly. To be honest, the most worrying portion of Ezekiel is Chapter 28 verses 13-17," Daniel winced, "because although the condemnation is superficially addressed to the King of Tyre, God is poetically addressing the Devil. According to those verses, Satan was originally a faithful angel who was the Cherub in charge of the Garden of Eden, assigned to protect and care for Adam & Eve…"

Tapping on his handheld with the stylus, Daniel brought up the relevant passage and clearing his throat self-consciously, read out: 'You were full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. In the Garden of God you used to be. Every precious stone was your covering, ruby, topaz and jasper; chysolite, onyx and jade; sapphire, turquoise and emerald…You were the anointed cherub…on the holy mountain of God you proved to be. In the midst of fiery stones you walked about. You were faultless from your being created until the day unrighteousness was found in you…you began to sin. And I put you as profane out of the mountain of God…your heart became haughty because of your beauty. You brought your wisdom to ruin on account of your beaming splendour.'"

For a moment even Jack was silenced by the forceful imagery of the passage.

Sam admitted hesitantly, "The description of glittering jewels and walking about in the midst of fiery stones does seem to suggest the glowing corona of an Ascended Ancient…"

"Which is why it worries me now I look at it afresh with the Goa'uld-in-Eden idea," Daniel admitted. "If those verses _aren't_ warning that an Ascended Ancient was taken over by a Goa'uld as a host I'll…go fishing with Jack for a year…and the idea that a Goa'uld can overcome the will of an Ascended Ancient, even if only temporarily and for short periods of time, is something that quite frankly scares the hell out of me."

Resolutely ignoring Daniel's comment, Jack said to Hammond, "I have to admit, Sir, it would explain how the snake got to Eve so easily. Those verses clearly imply that the Goa'uld was able to control the Ancient to such an extent that the God-entity and other Ancients didn't realise they'd been infiltrated until it was far too late – the damage had been done."

"The Goa'uld had jumped host, probably to Adam," Daniel hypothesised. "The Bible always squarely blames Adam for mankind's fall, not Eve, because it says that while the Devil tricked Eve, Adam was _wilfully _disobedientwhich would be another clue he was a host. If nobody at the time fully grasped what was going on, all the Goa'uld would have to do would be to lie low in Adam until it was safe enough or desperate enough to risk moving to another host, like Cain. Genesis says that after Cain murdered Abel, God banished him to "the land of Fugitiveness" or Nod, which was uninhabited. Genesis Chapter 4, verse 13 or 14 somewhere says that Cain would become a wanderer on the Earth. If we take Nod as the Ancients' by-then abandoned home nation, namely what we now call Antarctica, it's probable that Cain made his way to the Stargate and was sensible enough to stick close enough by it to escape when God brought the Great Flood a millennium or so later."

"How long did Cain live?" Hammond asked.

Daniel shook his head. "The bible doesn't say. In fact, it never mentions him after Genesis Chapter…4, I think. But Cain left with a wife, and had a son Enoch who was born in this land of Nod, so there were new potential hosts for the Goa'uld I presume was in Cain. In fact, Genesis mentions Cain's great-great-great-grandson, Lamech specifically not only because Lamech was the world's first polygamist but because he composed a poem for his two wives, in which he confesses to murdering an unnamed youth who hit him in a fight, making him the world's second wilful murderer, so possibly Cain had died and Lamech was the new host."

Major Davis added nervously, "Lamech's three sons were Jabal who founded livestock farming, Jubal apparently was the world's first musician and Tubal-cain was the world's first blacksmith. That could be Moses' way of trying to warn that the Goa'uld was showing Cain's family how to access at least some of the Antarctica Stargate technology, probably enough for whoever was the host to flee through the Stargate when the Flood began. I think the bible specifically names Lamech's daughter, Niamh, or Naaman or Naamah, which is very rare, but gives us no other details about her. Maybe Moses listed her because she was the host by the time of the flood."

"Whatever the details, the most likely scenario is that's how the Goa'uld escaped Earth for the duration of the deluge, then came back a century or so after everything had quietened down and infested Nimrod." Daniel rounded off, "Other Goa'uld still trapped in Unas hosts may have looked at pretty Naamah or whoever and followed her back to Earth that time, leading to Ra and so on."

"Very well," General Hammond looked around the table soberly. "For the next two weeks I can allow us to make Nemetae and Uhutac the top priority. Major Davis, you'll co-ordinate SG-2, 3, 5 and 8 as they explore Nemetae and Uhutac. Colonel O'Neill, you will oversee Sergeant Siler and the tech teams and make sure that we secure any weaponry that the Goa'uld may return to try and appropriate. Major Carter and Dr Fraiser, you'll deal with the engineering and medical investigations, Dr Jackson, please translate as much as you can as fast as you can. Dismissed…Colonel, a word in my office, please?"

"Sir…" they chorused, pushing back chairs and gathering up papers hastily.

As the others dispersed, Jack followed General Hammond into the latter's office and closed the door, turning to face Hammond as the General took his seat behind his desk. "Sir…"

Hammond raised one eyebrow in a probably deliberate imitation of Teal'c. "Colonel, I don't remember uttering the words 'at ease'."

Instantly Jack stiffened in a parade-ground rigid stance. George Hammond had a reserved demeanour and a quietly-spoken manner, along with an almost unheard of courtesy in suffixing orders with 'please' and always remembering to thank his subordinates for their efforts, in stark contrast to some brass with I-am-god delusions. However, Jack wasn't fooled by the fact that his superior had phrased his rebuke in such a way instead of bellowing and yelling. Hammond and very sharp teeth when he chose to use them, and had no compunction about exercising his considerable authority even though he chose to give his people plenty of room to manoeuvre; besides, Jack was already feeling the stings of increasing guilt, having crossed his own internal line of acceptable behaviour, never mind anyone else's.

"Would you care to explain your attitude in that briefing, Colonel O'Neill?" Hammond's tone was sharp. "You were deliberately trying to antagonise Dr Jackson and that is the most unprofessional attitude I have ever seen. Halfway through I was seriously considering reducing you back to Major."

"No excuse, sir," Jack confessed.

"So you were just having a bad day?" challenged Hammond.

"Bad…days, sir," Jack admitted. "I've been feeling…out of sorts for a few days, I haven't been sleeping well. I know I should apologise to Daniel."

Hammond frowned, but Jack recognised the expression of concern rather than anger in the General's eyes, especially when Hammond said with much less hostility in his tone, "If that's you out of sorts, I'd hate to see downright cranky."

"Sir," Jack risked a quick smile. "I…felt a little a dizzy while we exploring the major city on Ca- Nemetae…but then I was fine. However, over the past few days I've been getting these headaches and feeling really edgy. Maybe I picked up something, I don't know…Maybe having Dr Fraiser check me over would be a good idea…" he admitted reluctantly.

Hammond raised both eyebrows at this offer. "I agree. Report to the infirmary immediately and have her check."

"Thank you, sir."

"And Jack…whatever she finds, I also expect an immediate attitude adjustment, do I make myself clear?"

"Yes sir!" Jack left Hammond's office as fast as he could knowing he'd got off lightly in comparison to what the General could have done to him…Major O'Neill…ye-ouch!

Any lingering hope Jack had that his bad attitude hadn't been _that_ obvious withered as he entered the base infirmary and Dr Fraiser watched him approach with a frosty expression and pebble-hard brown eyes that seemed to gleam with the threat of imminent assault with a scalpel or forcible colonic irrigation. "Colonel."

Ouch, not Jack or even an O'Neill; time to make nice with the lady who could cause him a world of hurt, literally. "I asked General Hammond if you could run a few tests for me."

For a moment he savoured her pole-axed expression at Jack O'Neill entering her lair voluntarily and it _not_ being the end of the world before she recovered. "You're feeling ill?"

"Not really…kinda…sorta…" Jack wavered between negation and confession.

"Sit on the bed. What are your symptoms?" Long used to the macho idiocy that made the human male apparently determined to insist that a severed limb was a minor cut and hacking up a lung was a bit of a sniffle, Janet rapped out her orders briskly and in a no-nonsense voice.

Relating his momentary dizziness on Nemetae, Jack explained his headaches and mood swings and finished with his nightmares of the previous two nights. When she pressed for details, he kept it short, just explaining how on each occasion he'd been trapped in a sarcophagus.

As she went off to get needles and other nasty medical implements, Jack tried to relax; he'd no intention of going into explicit detail over the last two nights' nightmares. He'd been in a sarcophagus all right, but he hadn't been _trapped _there.

Jack blew out a breath wearily. Back in the Gulf War… had it been 1991 or later? - the memories all tended to blur after a while and anyway paled into insignificance in comparison to the Stargate project – he'd been second-in-command of a mission ambushed near Basra. The whole situation had nearly been as blown as the mission the Gamekeeper had accessed from his memory.

Insurgents had attacked the two-truck convoy with Kalashnikovs and mortars and small shoulder-mounted rockets, but surprise had been their only advantage with their equipment, Russian cast-offs, being about reliable as the weather report. Nevertheless, Jack's squad had lost two men. Henson had taken a direct hit to the head in the fire fight, but Majchzruk…Jack remembered crawling rapidly over to the kid as bullets whizzed overhead like angry wasps…Barely twenty-one, the kid was Matinee idol handsome but saved by a sincere, friendly personality who bore the nickname 'Madge' in good humour…he'd been lying flat on his back, unmoving just off at the side of the road with his eyes closed…

Jack swallowed at the memory. He'd expected to see a big bruise on the kid's noggin to explain why he was taking a nap in a fire fight, but there quite literally hadn't been a mark on him…not even a dirt scuff. With the insurgents suicidally persistent and improving their aim, Jack had grabbed Madge to haul him to the safety of the truck…but there had been nothing behind Madge's face, like those old Spaghetti Western movie-set façades where you walked around the frontage and found just an empty lot. Poor bastard's head had been blown away, leaving literally just his face, an unmarked, perfectly preserved mask. The white bone of Majchzruk's spine had been stark against the blood soaking Jack's hands, the shredded flesh and sinew of his back side as mangled as his front was unblemished…

"Colonel!"

Jack jumped and winced as Janet Fraiser peered at him anxiously, her earlier ire receding. "You really do look tired."

"Tell me about it." Jack managed without much of his usual wisecracking tone.

She went off again and he closed his eyes wearily. That not-happy memory had featured heavily in his nightmares over the past few nights. The first night he'd been in a sarcophagus, not trapped but cocooned. Lying in total darkness growing strong; feeling the vitality and power infusing his body with a wellbeing beyond the mere physical: confidence; power; determination.

Daniel had suddenly appeared looking down at him, dressed, bizarrely, like Skaara had been when he was Klorel's host; he had proceeded to scold Jack like mom used to when she caught him sneaking out of his bedroom window at night to go drag racing…then Daniel had pulled out a .45 and shot Jack straight between the eyes – the point at which Jack had sat bolt upright gasping for breath and sweating.

The next night had been worse. This time Jack had been hurrying towards the sarcophagus, gold and gleaming and welcoming, knowing it would fill him with strength and energy. Suddenly Daniel was in the way again, this time dressed in his usual fatigues, but with a blue top over green pants unlike SG-1's usual either all-blue or all-green fatigues. Once again he began to tell Jack how wicked and evil he was for using the sarcophagus and suddenly a C4 detonator with a timer appeared in his hand that he turned to place on the sarcophagus. With irritation, Jack shot him dead and then had to shove the corpse aside with his boot to climb inside. He settled down, desperate to feel the revitalising power and high provided by the sarcophagus, when suddenly Daniel was standing over him again lecturing, but this time…this time most of Daniel's head was a gory, bloody mess, just like Madge's had been.

Hands in pockets, Jack O'Neill wondered down the corridor heading for the Commissary. Today was a good day for pie; it was usually cherry or pecan. He didn't rush, enjoying the sensation of not having to travel at breakneck speed for once.

Coming back to find O'Neill spaced-out again had been sufficient for Dr Fraiser to order four days of complete rest away from the GC, and she'd upped it to five when Jack had accepted her order with gratitude rather than protest. Technically he had still been on call as Nemetae was still an "active" mission, so he couldn't go to his cabin in Minnesota, but Jack found the back porch of his house in Colorado Springs had sufficed. Days of watching the curling and the hockey, nights of star-gazing and above all not one single nightmare had improved his outlook no end.

Not even having a progress briefing this morning by the research scientists had traumatised him. Jack had been braced for a full onslaught but to his pleased surprise the scientist delivering the briefing had been Area 51's own Dr Rex Amoa. Daniel and Sam were both geniuses, but tended to get carried away by their own enthusiasm. Put the pair in a room with a similar range of IQs and they started gibbering like Gibraltar monkeys, instantly incomprehensible to anyone who's IQ came in at under-190.

Doc Rex was possibly even more stupendously brainy but had one vastly important character virtue. A huge, jovial African-American by birth and nationality, Amoa had spent his formative years in French Senegal, and thus spoke with sonorous melody – slowly. After every other sentence, he would trail off in a lengthy pause to contemplate briefly whatever revelation his brilliant brain had cooked up in the interim. This of course allowed the less mentally agile members of the audience to work out more or less what he was going on about before he restarted; they might not be on the same page, but Jack had opened the same book at least. As his Irish mother would have put it, Amoa talked like he was being billed by the verb.

According to Doc Rex, it was a 'good news & we're getting there' scenario. An irreparably-damaged MALP had been sacrificed and as Carter hoped, had indeed negated the threat of the Uhutaci defence drones. Testing of the Jaffa's full skeleton had verified his age and humanity and examination of both Nemetae and Utuhac had shown technology that had the scientific types and the Pentagon practically drooling. The Nemetae and the Uhutacis had reached a greater level of technological advancement than even the Asgard, millennia before the little grey guys – had their civilisations not been wiped out the possibilities were incredible.

That brought the situation to the getting there bit. Sorting out what had gone wrong, and how Nimrod fitted into the mix was proving elusive. According to Professor Amoa, most primary deities and belief systems in the world could be traced back to a very small group of individuals, giving credence to the idea that most of modern humanity sprang from a very small gene pool, such as the few survivors of an Ancient plague – or a global deluge. Thus the Babylonians had called Nimrod Marduk, the Sumerians Tammuz, the Caananites had called him Moloch and the Phoenicians Baal and so forth.

But these were all secondary embellishments to the original. The oldest and most accurate descriptions of Nimrod came from Jewish culture, wherein lay the problems. Most ancient Near and Middle Eastern cultures such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, etc., make modern-day graffiti artists look like second-rate wannabes. Not so the Jews or as called in ancient times, Israelites. They had not adorned the walls of their cities with descriptive texts or images, nor had they gone in for ostentatious statuary of prominent citizens.

Like Dr Amoa had said, the Jews had had plenty of art and culture, the difficulty was in how they had recorded it. Originally a large clan, the Israelites had emerged from two centuries of life in Egypt with a sense of national identity in 1513 B.C., under the leadership of the famed Moses. They had then wondered around the Near East for half a century before settling in the Fertile Crescent of Palestine.

The Egyptians, despite or because of their Goa'uld influence, were pretty smart. Smart enough to take the sweat out of writing caused by chipping letters into bits of stone by instead inventing the world's first paper out of Papyrus reeds. For the Jews leaving Egypt, papyrus was perfect. Simple to make, light to carry and easier to transport in bulk than massive stone stele or even smaller stone tablets, papyrus scrolls had been ideal for a nomadic, frequently moving, but literate nation.

Unfortunately, as Jack now knew, once the Israelites had done their walls of Jericho deal and settled into the Promised Land, they hadn't changed that MO. Instead of statuary and ostentatious tombs recounting their wonderfulness, the Israelite culture had focussed exclusively on writing and music; Israelite musicians were the Elvis Presley of their era. Normally a culture that believed so strongly in the written account would have sent archaeologists into paroxysms of adoration, except for the fact that the Israelites routinely used papyrus and then other forms of scroll, not stone or even wood. In short, acutely vulnerable to fire, flood, vermin, deliberate damage or just the deterioration of inexorable time.

Daniel was currently using every source he could beg or coerce but was apparently having a hard time of it. Osiris, the Goa'uld formerly known as Sarah Gardner, was still out there somewhere plotting mayhem, though Steve Rayner had recovered sufficiently and was now normally based at either the Alpha or Beta sites, having figured enough out to be immune to cover stories.

At the briefing with Professor Amoa, Rayner had explained that Daniel had ended his 'public' career as a figure of ridicule and then apparently disappeared into thin air rather than joining the circuit of usually vociferous fringe lunatics. Daniel's reappearance in Chicago following the death of Dr Jordan and the subsequent sudden deaths of two people plus the disappearance of Dr Jackson (again) along with _both_ Dr Jordan's assistants Dr Gardner and Dr Rayner had set tongues wagging. When Dr Jackson telephoned eminent professors, even assuming they'd accept the call from an 'out-where-the-buses-don't-run crackpot', they would react with surprise and suspicion when Daniel, whose area of expertise was primarily Egyptology, started asking detailed questions about a historical figure in Judaism.

Jack knew what talking to pen-pushers and bean-counters was like; bruised heads and brick walls sprang to mind. Indeed, he winced as he reached the corridor intersection just outside Daniel's lab and overheard Daniel talking loudly.

"I don't care! I just don't care…" crash…slam… "Like I'd _trust_ Jack after that stupid stunt he pulled with the Tollan? He was happy to sell out to bunch of extraterrestrial Nazis…"

_What?_ Jack stopped dead in outraged shock at this vitriolic character assassination.

Slam…whack…thud…"He killed Reese like she was animal…suppose we should be grateful he didn't take a dislike to Loren, else we'd all have been killed by the Light…good job there aren't any Nemetae children left around for him to massacre –"

Abruptly engulfed in a scalding wave of anger, Jack's rational mind shut down as he sprang forward in a fury at his target.

_**To be continued…**_

© 2005 C D Stewart


	4. Chapter 4

_**Disclaimer: **Stargate SG:1 remains the property of Richard Dean Anderson, Greenburg et al. No money is being made from this fic. (This story is set way before Daniel's "Ascension"; it is my first attempt at a Stargate story and I'm nowhere near confident with the original quartet of characters as it is, never mind trying to get a handle on Jonas Quinn)._

_**Summary: **See Part 1_

**SARCOPHAGUS**

**Part 4**

**CHAPTER FOUR **

Sam saved the data to her laptop and shut it down. Small though it might be, the information was another tiny step forward in their understanding. There were dead Jaffa on Uhutac, killed by the defence drones, but not on Nemetae. Most likely, the Earth Goa'uld had escaped through the Antarctic Stargate when Noah's Entity friend caused the Flood, probably with Lamech's daughter Naamah as the host and presumably extended family members as Jaffa.

Somehow Naamah had ended up on Uhutac. Possibly the defence drones had not activated immediately, until Naamah ordered a Jaffa to do something stupid? But how had the Goa'uld escaped? Going back to Earth would just put her in an ice cavern several miles below the Antarctic shelf. On the other hand, the drones were lethal but not that sophisticated. The foliage of that arbour had been very thick. Had Naamah dived in and hidden like a gopher in its hole while the drones slaughtered her First Prime and Jaffa, sneaking out later? Maybe the Uhutacis had left something like a mini-shuttle near enough to the Stargate for her to utilise, or she had been able to dial another world from Uhutac?

However she'd escaped from Uhutac there was no indication that Naamah or any Goa'uld had found Nemetae itself, so she wasn't the Goa'uld who found the sarcophagus technology after all – one more mystery to add to the many. Presumably Naamah had returned to Earth by spaceship after the Flood, and for some reason was forced to relinquish Naamah as the host in favour of Nimrod. Cue Tower of Babel and good old Shem somehow got the Goa'uld and Nimrod. Presumably Nimrod had left a trail in space that other Goa'uld – Ra and Osiris for instance – had followed to reach Earth.

The fact that Ra had the Egyptians build pyramids first off, which was labour intensive and lengthy, indicated that when they first arrived on Earth, the Goa'uld had no access to a Stargate. The frozen Jaffa serpent-guard in Antarctica indicated that Apophis had tried that approach first and given up. Could it be that the Goa'uld couldn't build Stargates of their own but had had to steal one from somewhere else? Ra presumably had purloined the Giza Stargate from somewhere else. Maybe the reason some of the Stargate addresses on the Abdyos Cartouche wouldn't dial in was because System Lords had swiped them in antiquity to use in other places?

Unfortunately the trail was going cold after Nimrod, to Daniel's increasing frustration, due to the ancient Israelites unfortunate habit of recording so much of their history on perishable scrolls not in stone or wood. Lately Daniel had been so tense you could use him as guitar string. His and Jack's confrontation on Euronda earlier this year had upset him more than he let on, and he considered Jack's shooting of the android girl Reese as nothing less than murder. Sam sighed as she prepared to head for the Commissary and a generous helping of naughty cherry pie; the truth was they owed Daniel big time – he'd saved them from making a horrific mistake and enabling Alar's repulsive little gang to wipe out the Eurondans.

The trouble was one of perception or rather mutual misunderstanding. Colonel O'Neill's absolute refusal to refer to the near-miss was embarrassed chagrin, but Daniel had been reading it as obstinate self-justification even before the Reese disaster. Sam believed Daniel and she would have believed Reese if she had been in the Gate Room. For whatever reason he'd had in creating her that way, Reese's 'father' had made her to be a child, and faced with the enormity of what was happening around her, Reese would have obeyed Daniel's wish for the replicators to stop their attack.

But she could also see it from Ja- Colonel O'Neill's point of view. He had no way of knowing what he would find on the other side of the Gate Room door. He had no way of knowing _if_ Reese was stopping the replicators – or more importantly whether she still _could_. She _had_ been losing control of at least one or two. All Jack had seen was that Reese had deliberately injured Daniel and the replicators were still attacking. So he did what he was trained to do and took instant, decisive action to eliminate the threat. Daniel had seen nothing but yet another example of Colonel O'Neill's unfortunate tendency towards 'There's my way or the wrong way', which was one of the Colonel's few _unattractive_ personality quirks.

It was a pity –

Sam nearly had a heart attack when the base's klaxons suddenly blasted out, the red lights whirling. Sergeant Harriman's voice blared out of the Tannoy, "Security to Dr Jackson's lab! Security to Dr Jackson's lab! Stat!"

Running out of her own lab Sam slotted in behind Teal'c and the Marines who were hurrying along the corridors. Reaching Daniel's on-base lab both Teal'c and Sam drew up short at the sight of Daniel at the far end of the room facing off against Jack at this end of the room; Daniel was gripping a small statue of the Egyptian cat-goddess Bast in one hand, Jack's fists were clenched and he was quivering as if on the verge of flinging himself at the other man. Something heavy had collided with the central table in the room, for books, papers and various knick-knacks had been knocked on to the floor.

Taking in the situation at a glance, General Hammond barked, "Stand down, Colonel! Dr Jackson!"

Colonel O'Neill twitched reflexively. "General –"

"What in God's name is going on here?" Hammond glared from to the other.

"You tell me!" Daniel burst out, not relinquishing his hold on the statue. "I'm working in my lab, next thing he bursts in and attacks -"

"Damn right I did, you coward!" O'Neill erupted. "You make out like I got some sort of sick thrill out of killing Reese? 'Like she was animal'? Saying that I'd happily mass murder Nemetae children? Where the hell do you think you get off, Jackson? You have a problem with me you say it to my face, you don't slander me behind my back!"

"How crazy are you?" Daniel yelled back, "I didn't say that!"

"I was standing right outside. I heard you!"

"Colonel O'Neill," Dr Fraiser cut in sharply. "I was just down the corridor when I saw you charge in here, and nobody came out in the second it took me to run up and sound the alarm. There couldn't have been anyone else in this lab apart from Dr Jackson."

"You see!" Daniel finally tossed aside the statue to throw up his hands angrily. "I was working alone in here. The security cameras will verify that. I didn't say anything!"

"But you were thinking it!" Jack heard himself almost howl the words in fury – and then he stopped dead as the epiphany whacked him upside the head.

"Dr Jackson, I –" began General Hammond.

"That's it!" Jack burst out, cutting his superior off. "You were thinking it."

"Colonel, at this moment you are a hair's breadth away from –" General Hammond's patience and temper were almost on empty.

"No, no!" Jack spun towards Dr Fraiser triumphantly. "That's it. The nightmares I've been having, the sudden mood swings I couldn't explain since we came back from Nemetae. They weren't my feelings, they were Daniel's. I know what he's thinking. I feel what he's feeling!"

"Jack, that is the lamest excuse you have ever come up with, and you've tried a few!" Daniel retorted before Dr Fraiser, looking startled, could speak. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

Jack saw the disbelief on their faces; even Teal'c the poster-boy for expressionless stoicism, exuded doubt in his manner. Okay, he needed to score big. "Oh really? In that case, Danny-boy, how come I _know_ that you would give absolutely anything just to be able to get into a sarcophagus one more time?" He waited in the total silence for one heartbeat, then two, then "…and how ashamed you are of that fact?"

Bingo. Direct ICBM hit dead-centre of Jacksonville. It was like watching water drain out of a suddenly-holed bucket; the colour leached from Daniel's face until he was putty-grey and unconsciously he wrapped his arms around himself in the eternal self-protective gesture.

"Dr Jackson?" General Hammond questioned.

"I-It's impossible." Daniel stumbled, shaking his head. "Isn't it?"

"Dr Fraiser, is it possible?" Realising he would get no help from that quarter at least at this juncture, Hammond turned to his favourite medical advisor.

"Yes, I suppose…" Janet Fraiser shrugged helplessly. "Nemetae is an entirely alien planet littered with extremely advanced technology which, like Colonel O'Neill has pointed out before, is usually crystal powered."

"Meaning what?" General Hammond wasn't in the mood for verbosity, not with his top team in meltdown in front of him.

"Meaning a lot of it is probably on 'standby' rather than 'switched off'. It's possible SG-1 could have triggered something as they passed it." She paused and turned to look at O'Neill. "Colonel, can you tell what Dr Jackson is thinking at this moment?"

"Doc, we can all tell what Daniel's thinking at this moment." Jack shot back.

"Colonel O'Neill, I'm seconds away from either having you arrested or sedated. I suggest you lose the wisecracks and focus on saving your ass from my sling." General Hammond was rarely _seriously_ publicly angry and it was intimidating when he was.

Right now, he was very intimidating. "Yes sir." Jack got a grip, aware that Hammond wasn't in any way being humorous. He deliberately turned to fully face Daniel, having previously been standing sideways so he had a clear view of the doorway and Daniel's position. "No…I got nothing now."

General Hammond, Dr Fraiser and Teal'c were a matching trio of sceptically raised eyebrows and Jack was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the glaringly obvious bright-red weal across Daniel's cheek. _Crap_. He'd been so ballistic he hadn't even realised he'd struck Daniel. In about another split-second General Hammond's brain was finally going to process what _that_ visual meant and a second after that he was going to have Jack's ass hauled to the brig for eternity and then some –

It was Carter, as ever, who saved the day. "Wait sir, please." She looked at Jack. "Colonel, where were you when you…heard…Daniel. _Exactly_ where were you?"

Ruthlessly suppressing his defence-mechanism flippancy, Jack pointed, "Right at that corner there where the corridor zig-zags. I was on my way to the Commissary."

"Daniel…you were this end of the room?" She indicated the doorway end of the table, where most of the mess was.

"Yes," Daniel agreed curtly, having now folded his arms across his chest.

"Major Carter?" General Hammond made it a demand.

"Sir, I have an idea." Sam moved so she was more in the middle of the room, between Jack and everyone at the doorway and Daniel's defensive position in front of the back wall. "The distance between the corridor corner and where Daniel was standing is about five and a half feet, but the diameter of this lab is nearly ten feet, so now Daniel and the Colonel are standing ten feet apart." _Physically that is; emotionally they're not even in the same solar system. The tension in here's thicker and harder than Aunt Dot's harvest sponge cake. Yikes._

"What does that mean?" Janet Fraiser looked at her friend, seeing faintly where she was going.

"Sir, if I may?" Giving General Hammond a quick nod, Sam turned to Jack and Daniel, who were both standing there with expectant expressions. _One day I'm not going to be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat and it'll get us all killed_. That was a nightmare for another day. Concentrating on the present crisis, Sam said, "Colonel, would you please take about four steps forward? Daniel, don't move."

Jack did so, walking into the lab from the doorway.

"Colonel?" Sam questioned.

"Major?" Jack responded.

"Anything?"

Jack concentrated. "No, can't hear or feel anything."

"Sir, please walk forward again." She requested.

A few steps at Jack walked further into the room, closer to where Daniel stood still and tense. From ten feet to nine, to eight, to seven, to six feet apart, to –

"Whoa!" Jack halted mid-step as he was suddenly swamped with a sensation of anger, fear, shock, and a desire to _cry_? At the same time he heard quite clearly Daniel's complaining litany of _this is absolutely ridiculous. It's impossible, I've never heard anything so crazy_, despite the fact that Daniel wasn't uttering a word and his lips were in fact pressed tightly together.

"Five and a half feet, more or less," Carter estimated. "Daniel?"

"Nothing," Daniel snapped. "I can't hear or feel anything." His _thank god_, was nevertheless clearly audible.

Teal'c felt this was serious enough to exercise both eyebrows and throw in a quizzical head tilt. "For what purpose would anyone invent a device that gifted an individual with telepathy and empathy only at extremely close range?"

"That's just the question, Teal'c," Hammond agreed. "Do you have any more theories to answer it, Major Carter?"

"Not at this point, sir." Sam shook her head, "I'm baffled. If the telepathy and empathy had operated both ways…"

"I have no idea either, General," Dr Fraiser chimed in, "I can't imagine any point in a device that gives only one person those abilities and only effective in such close proximity? I suppose there might be some use in close-quarters combat…" she trailed off as the significance of the red mark on Daniel's face finally impinged thanks to her final statement.

"On contrary, Dr Fraiser," Teal'c commented, "such an ability would be a serious disadvantage and would almost certainly result in the death of the warrior possessing those abilities."

"How so?" Janet noted with surprise the expressions of discomfort on the faces of the General, Jack O'Neill, Sam Carter and even, yes, Daniel Jackson.

"To survive in battle, a warrior must condition himself to view his foe as nothing other than The Enemy. The warrior must not acknowledge that his enemy has a mother, or a wife, or children, or that he fights with honour and courage. To do so would be fatal."

Janet nodded. "Of course, a – warrior – who could hear the thoughts and feel the emotions of the other combatant would be emotionally crippled, too paralysed to act, unless he was a violent sociopath. In any other circumstance he would hesitate and be far more likely to be killed himself."

"Indeed." Teal'c inclined his head.

"General Hammond." Carter looked earnestly at their commander. "I would swear that we didn't touch anything or activate anything on Nemetae. My instruments never recorded an energy spike of any kind."

"You must have triggered something," General Hammond pointed out.

Dr Fraiser turned to Jack. "Colonel, you said you felt dizzy on Nemetae? Can you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing? Where was the rest of SG-1 in relation to you?"

Jack frowned, focussing his mind on the moment. "We were in the main corridor, heading towards what turned out to be the sarcophagus room. Carter was up ahead, about fifteen feet. Teal'c was…ahead left. Five feet, may be nine or ten, looking the rooms on the left. I paused outside an office doorway on the right…Daniel was inside looking, but there was nothing there, just a really ugly desk lamp. I went dizzy for a second, Daniel came out, we moved on."

"Dr Jackson, did you touch the desk lamp at all?" General Hammond asked.

Daniel considered. "I think so; it was right on the edge of the desk, I didn't want to knock it over. But nothing happened; I barely touched it with my hand and there was no energy output of any kind. There were no switches or knobs to press."

"Then if the object was merely a desk-lamp, how was it to be turned on and off without switch or dial?" Teal'c interposed.

"Sir, it may be nothing, but it's the only lead we've got." Sam said to General Hammond earnestly, "I recommend we go back to the planet and see if we can find anything about this phenomenon in their literature."

"Agreed, Major. I want you on the ramp in two minutes," General Hammond stated. "Oh, and on this mission, Major Carter, you are in command. Is that clear, Colonel?"

"Yes sir," Jack acknowledged with alacrity. Of course he didn't like it, but this was taking 'compromised' to a whole new level. Right now, other than Teal'c, Carter was the most rational member of SG-1.

SG-1 being SG-1 they were actually ready in about seventy seconds of their allotted 120. As they exited the Stargate on Nemetae, Sam Carter privately considered herself to have been given the poisoned chalice. Teal'c, on her left, was the picture of stoicism and, bless him, could be counted upon to be his usual silent, imperturbable rock-solid self. Daniel and the Colonel, however, were a tension convention. Both were as stiff and brittle as sun-dried twigs and upon exiting the Stargate had immediately moved apart to a distance of six feet. Oh joy.

Keeping up a good pace, they were able to just pass the various SGC personnel working amongst the ruins with nothing more than polite nods of acknowledgement. Once in the city proper, Teal'c accompanied Daniel to the main central city 'library' whilst Colonel O'Neill went with Carter until they got to the large building and went inside, heading straight for the room that Daniel had been in.

The 'desk lamp' sat untouched on the desk and using plastic gloves and the container she'd brought, Sam was able to deposit the lamp into it. It was remarkably light, if an ugly-looking silver grey hue. She noted however, that there seemed to be no switches of any kind, nor was there a bulb or anything that looked as if it were supposed to emit light. Some sort of decorative sculpture, perhaps? In which case, assuming it was the culprit, what was the purpose of granting telepathy and empathy abilities, and if Daniel had been touching it, why was Colonel O'Neill the one affected?

They were questions to which Sam had no answers, so she carefully placed the container in the carry-sack and nodded to the Colonel, who was looking decidedly strained in the doorway. Together their way back outside, but Sam made no effort to break the silence. Her grandmother had been full of sayings such as how eavesdroppers never heard anything good of themselves. Replaying that whole scene – no, that _showdown_ – between Col – Jack and Daniel – in the lab, she strongly suspected O'Neill had been well and truly smacked in the face with that truism.

She herself had on many occasions recited a furious and vitriolic silent soliloquy in the privacy of her own head that would have seen her court-martialled or provoking shock and outrage had it been audible. Daniel had merely denied _saying_ anything, not that what O'Neill had claimed wasn't what he really had been thinking. Looking at the Colonel's closed-off face and his full-on 'Here be dragons' body-language, Sam knew that he would have been deeply upset not so much at the sentiments themselves, but at the fact that _Daniel_ genuinely believed them to be true representations of how Jack O'Neill thought, acted and felt.

Daniel Jackson and Jack O'Neill had an odd and complex relationship that was nevertheless a deep friendship. They were vastly different men in personality and outlook, yet they had strongly intertwined common goals and beliefs that bridged the gap between the cynical-chip-on-both-shoulders O'Neill and the let's-give-people-the-benefit-of-the-doubt Jackson. Along with now-Colonel Ferretti, they were the only survivors of the original Abydos mission, a bond that nothing could shatter.

They interacted on many levels of subtlety but that very subtlety meant much of Daniel and Jack's relationship occurred on a non-verbal level, and there was therefore far more scope for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. As Sam's college Psychology lecturer had often reiterated: _Is it a smile, or a grimace?_ Daniel was angry with his friend because he perceived Jack's actions with the Eurondans as cavalier and with Reese as dishonourable. Jack in turn was angry with Daniel because he was ashamed of being taken in by Alar's rhetoric and because he thought he had been in the right with Reese.

Daniel's problem was that he had never had a home or a family until he married Sha're and was embraced as part of her people by the Abydonians. He'd found that again at the SGC; Sam knew he viewed herself, Jack and Teal'c as the sister and brothers he'd never had, with General Hammond as a sort of paternal figure. But like all kids do with their big brothers, Daniel had expectations of Jack in terms that went beyond physical skills. Daniel expected Jack O'Neill to adhere to virtues and personal excellence a living saint would have found it difficult to live up to.

Her college Psych lecturer – whom Sam was beginning to think was seriously way smarter than she'd appreciated at the time – had stated that the biggest problem in any interpersonal relationship was this 'pedestal tendency'. People expected nothing of those they disliked. But a person they chose as their lover, or their friend, such a person by definition had to be special because the individual had chosen them; therefore the hapless recipient was placed on an emotional pedestal, imbued with qualities and abilities the individual sought and admired.

The problem came when the person fell off. A person expected nothing better of those he disliked, but reacted with an entirely disproportionate anger and punishment towards someone he or she loved when they failed to maintain their footing on the pedestal. The reaction was something almost always experienced by parents at some point. As Sam's lecturer had also pointed out, nobody could maintain their balance on the pedestal forever, and the longer they managed to do so before screwing up, the worse the reaction of their child/sibling/lover/friend was likely to be, since the disappointment was proportionally greater.

Jack O'Neill was a lot brighter than he made out he was; he was skilled and talented; he was courageous and honest; he had integrity and disguised dedication and faith under a self-protective veneer of flippancy. In short, he had managed to balance on the pedestal Daniel had placed him on for a long time, and so his 'fall' as Daniel considered it was of much greater magnitude.

Of course the converse also applied. Jack expected Daniel to be brilliant and intuitive and come up with the answers to solve the Mystery of Murder in B.C., or whatever. He viewed Daniel as brave and reliable, loyal and honourable. He viewed Daniel as the kid brother who needed to be safeguarded and protected. Daniel had called it right when Jack and Teal'c were just going to blow up the AI entity in the MALP room: "'You want to protect, because that's what you do.'" But in a way, it was still a pedestal that, in Jack O'Neill's eyes, Daniel had fallen off by not having faith in that Jack knew what he was doing and more significantly was right.

In short, this situation was completely FUBAR and much as her jaw ached with the blockage of restrained words, Sam had no intention of getting in the middle of it, even had Jack O'Neill being her immediate Commanding Officer not virtually precluded it. In a way, this telepathic thing was just what was needed. Daniel and Jack had both been simmering away for nearly two years now; a good clearing of the air was needed. Sam didn't know how she knew it was vital that Daniel and Jack be back in simpatico again as soon as possible, but she just knew it was more important than anything that the two men mend their relationship.

Wrapped up in this reverie, she almost jumped out of her skin when her radio crackled to life, with Teal'c voice coming out of it. "I'm here, Teal'c."

"Daniel Jackson and myself have left the central library, we are currently at a building that Daniel Jackson believes to be the private house of the inventor of the desk lamp."

"Will that be of more help?" Sam queried.

"Documents at the library indicated this individual had his personal office and laboratories at his private residence. Daniel Jackson believes relevant information may be obtained here," Teal'c explained, providing the address.

"We're on our way," Sam confirmed.

It was about a five minute walk, though interminable in the company of Mr Brooding. Fortuitously as they turned into the rumble-strewn remains of what had been a pleasant residential street, they saw Teal'c standing outside the ruins of a large house and Daniel himself suddenly came out carrying bundles of the Nemetae version of PDAs.

"Some of them are damaged," Daniel told Sam as they met up, his eyes seeming to slide over Jack, "but I think we can repair them sufficiently for what we need."

"Good." Sam ignored the fact that Jack was also pretending that there was nothing but empty space next to Teal'c. "Let's get back to the SGC."

The house was in a part of the city conveniently located near the Stargate and the Central Library, indicating an individual of prominence and affluence, and it took only a few minutes before they were back at the Stargate and dialling Earth. Sam nodded to SG-18 but something in SG-1's manner must have warned the team off for they did not attempt to approach and exchange chit-chat. Sam privately mused that the tension roiling of Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson surely _had_ to be visible by now.

General Hammond and Dr Fraiser were both standing at the foot of the exit ramp wearing mutually expectant expressions.

"I think we may have found the answers, sir," Sam said confidently. "I have the desk lamp and Daniel had what he thinks are the inventor's private papers."

"Yes, sir," Daniel concurred. "General, if it's okay, I'd like to get started immediately –"

"By all means, Dr Jackson."

"General Hammond, I will accompany Daniel Jackson to see if I may be of assistance?"

"Of course, Teal'c." As the two left the Gate Room, General Hammond turned and ordered, "Airman, take that container to Major Carter's lab, carefully. Colonel, Major, I'd like a word before you do anything else."

"Yes, sir," They chorused.

Together they followed General Hammond back to his office as Janet Fraiser headed back to the Infirmary.

"At ease," General Hammond said before they had even finished coming to attention as he went behind his desk and sat down.

Jack relaxed, but not by much, unsure whether the General's latitude was strictly for Carter's benefit. When it came to insubordination, he had been pushing the envelope lately.

"How confident are you that you and Dr Jackson have the materials to fix this, Major?"

"Very, sir," Sam responded instantly. "It looks as if Daniel has managed to retrieve a wealth of information and the desk-lamp, assuming it is the culprit, doesn't look that complicated. To be honest, General, though I wouldn't mention this to the Asgard, most crystal-based technology seems to be pretty standardised in design regardless of whether you're dealing with the Ancients or the Goa'uld. Once you've figured out the basics you're usually okay. I should be able to work out how the desk-lamp works and by extension the sarcophagus technology -"

"That won't be your problem, Major."

"Sir?"

General Hammond drew in a breath, "In view of Colonel O'Neill's statements regarding Dr Jackson's need for the sarcophagi, I have decided to transport them all to the Area 51 facility by tonight –"

"GeneralHammondsirI'dreallybegratefulifyouwouldn'tdothat." Jack said the words in one breath.

An ominous frown began to make itself visible on the General's forehead. "Colonel, if Dr Jackson is craving the sarcophagus then how can I just leave temptation lying around the SGC?"

"Sir, Daniel is craving to go back in the sarcophagus, but he always _will_ crave it. That's what _addiction_ is, General. For instance, how long ago did you give up smoking?" Jack asked earnestly; he _had _to convince the General not to ship out the sarcophagi - that would be disastrous.

Hammond gave him a sharp look, but nodded. "I take your point, Colonel, but still…"

"General, with all due respect, you would never have known how Daniel was feeling if it hadn't been for my sudden telepathic ability," Jack pointed out carefully. "I'm quite sure the security camera footage you viewed while we were gone showed that Daniel was not talking to anyone in his lab, and the only claim you have regarding any cravings comes from me. Considering how irrational I was when I said it, for which I would like to sincerely apologise by the way –"

"Accepted, Colonel." General Hammond cut off the flow of words. "But my only concern is to help Dr Jackson. Wouldn't he be better off with them out of the way?"

"General, Daniel would never have let on how he was feeling, but he would _not_ have given in and gotten in one of those things," Jack stated with unshakeable conviction. "If you suddenly ship the sarcophaaaa-gi to Area 51 Daniel would take it as nothing less than an unforgivable insult to his good character."

"We'd lose him, sir," Sam put in desperately, unable to keep quiet despite her relief that Jack had finally seemed to get a clue regarding how upset Daniel really was. "In Daniel's eyes sending the sarcophagi away would be tantamount to us saying: 'You're untrustworthy', 'You're too weak-willed to face this thing and come through it'; 'You lack the integrity and fortitude to see it through'. He'd never forgive us, sir. He'd be out of the SGC so fast he'd leave scorch marks on the concrete."

"Very well, Major, you've made your point. I'll rescind the order – for now." General Hammond acceded. "You're dismissed, Major."

"Sir," Sam quickly escaped, hurrying towards her lab and deliberately not thinking about the exchange that must be occurring between Colonel O'Neill and General Hammond.

"No excuse, sir." Jack put in pre-emptively as soon as the corridor door was safely closed behind Major Carter.

"For what in particular, Colonel?" riposted Hammond sharply.

Jack inwardly winced. Hammond's temper was smouldering but not yet extinguished. "All of it, sir. I know my attitude and behaviour has been less than stellar."

"That I concur with, Colonel. You have let yourself down as a United States Air Force Officer, an American and as a man."

Jack had been unaware of General Hammond's ability to eviscerate someone with a single sentence - until now.

Hammond saw O'Neill flinch and was inwardly satisfied he'd made his point. To continue to harangue and berate someone endlessly once their mistake had become clear was not just counterproductive, but cruel and the clear mark of a bully. So he said, "However, I do understand that you haven't entirely been in control of your own actions. Nor do I consider Dr Jackson completely free from culpability…which is why you're not currently awaiting court-martial."

"Thank-you, General," Jack responded with genuine gratitude.

"It's clear to me that you and Dr Jackson have issues that need to be resolved. Issues that I consider may have been allowed to fester for some time…" General Hammond added obliquely, showing that he was far more perceptive than he often let on. "Beyond ridding you of the telepathic and empathic link, I also expect you, as SG-1's CO and as the elder man in this situation to take this opportunity to put those issues to rest once and for all. If not, my rumoured patience and latitude will take a permanent vacation. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal, sir."

"Good. Dismissed."

Exiting General Hammond's office with considerable relief, Jack hurried away down the corridor. Unlike General West, who had been far too close to the unlamented NID patsy General Bauer in personality and command style, General Hammond was one of the few men for whom Jack O'Neill had unconditional respect and admiration. He hadn't known George Hammond at all when he'd been recalled after Apophis's swoop on the Gate Room, but had quickly grown to like the man's style of command – and just like the man.

With General West, when Jack had confessed that he'd lied and Daniel Jackson was still alive on Abydos, there would have been a 50-50 risk of the General immediately clapping Jack in irons for court martial and making him watch as he sent a nuke through to Abydos anyway instead of being prepared to listen to a subordinate's greater experience in the matter. The instant Hammond had allowed him to explain _why_ he'd done what he'd done and then take the risk of sending a second mission to Abydos, Jack had known the SGC had struck gold with its new commander.

Which was why General Hammond's disappointment and disapproval upset Jack far more than he would ever let on; Jack's Pop hadn't been that far removed from George Hammond in temperament, and Jack missed the close relationship he'd had with Jonathan O'Neill senior. Dad wouldn't have been very impressed with him right now either –

He turned the corner and just managed to prevent himself bouncing off Teal'c's chest. "Teal'c? I thought you were with Daniel?"

"I determined that I would be unable to assist with the translation of the Nemetae text, as it is unlike any language that I have previously encountered. I have therefore removed myself so as not to distract Daniel Jackson," Teal'c stated. "I am going to Kelnorim."

As expected; Teal'c did not hang around when there was something more productive – in his view - he could be doing. "Maybe I should try it," He said, not entirely in jest.

"For what purpose?"

"Helping me be a little more enlightened for a start," Jack muttered. "I know I haven't exactly been at my best recently."

"I have been most perturbed by your behaviour of late, O'Neill."

_Which is Teal'c for 'You've been a complete asshole'_, "Uh, yeah, I know. I guess me and Daniel have got some issues to work through."

"Perhaps this incident may prove to be more beneficial than detrimental, O'Neill," Teal'c pointed out.

"Ya think?"

"There has been unnecessary tension between yourself and Daniel Jackson for some time," Teal'c commented. "It was most perturbing."

"You never said anything."

"I had hoped that you would resolve the matter if given sufficient opportunity."

Jack snorted derisorily at that notion. "Yeah…but come on Teal'c, you and Bra'tac can't agree on everything. What do you do when you have a problem with each other?"

The infamous eyebrow rose. "I never had a problem. Tec Mahtay Bra'tac is over 137 years old. He is always wise and knows what is appropriate. My personal feelings are irrelevant, as I trust that Bra'tac knows what he is doing."

"Right." Jack heroically fought the urge to roll his eyes. "I think I'm just going to get an early night."

"As am I. Good night, O'Neill."

Jack watched his large friend stride away and decided that his idea might just be a good one after all. In one direction lay Carter and in the other Daniel. Jack didn't want to deal with either of them right now and his only alternative was to pathetically wander the corridors of the SGC like a lost puppy.

_Come on kids,_ he silently willed the pair of them as he headed for his on-base sleeping quarters, _do your thing and fix this mess pronto so I can live happily in my own head again!_

_**To be concluded…**_

© 2005, Catherine D. Stewart


	5. Chapter 5

_**Disclaimer: **Stargate SG:1 remains the property of Richard Dean Anderson, Greenburg et al. No money is being made from this fic. _

_**Summary: **See Part 1_

**SARCOPHAGUS**

**Part 5**

**CHAPTER FIVE **

Jack pushed the slice of pie – pecan and walnut – around his plate desultorily, breaking off little sections with his fork but not actually eating any of it.

He sighed loudly and exaggeratedly. For the last three days SG-1 had been confined to the SGC. Jack had nightly got nine full hours of uninterrupted sleep – which was so unusual as to almost seem unnatural. He lingered over breakfast in the Commissary, having _two _cups of coffee and reading the paper from cover to cover. Then it was some venting by sparring with Teal'c, followed by another energy-burning workout in the gym, followed by a long shower and then back to his quarters to watch **_The Simpsons _**– and then bed.

Bed! He hadn't gone to sleep at eight-thirty since he was in footie pyjamas. At the end of the first day, there'd been a positive report from Carter to General Hammond; despite having no external switches, an MRI showed that the inside of the 'desk-lamp' was packed with crystals and the Nemetae version of circuit boards, a strong indication of 'guilt'. But that had been that. Jack hadn't actually seen hide nor hair or Sam and Daniel, and was increasingly having to fight the urge to stick his head round the door and 'encourage' them. Only the knowledge that he would be able to hear all the names Daniel would mentally call him prevented Jack from trying it.

Jack pushed the pie away. It just wasn't the same without the others. When they were on-duty but not off-world in the SGC, his team had certain habits and routines. Daniel would be in his lab for a while and Carter in hers. Jack would hang out with Teal'c then and take a look-see at what Carter was doing and then go and hover around Daniel, and then he would leave Daniel and come to the Commissary. Jack would make the important selection of pie in the knowledge that shortly first one would arrive, then the other two. They would get pie and coffee and the other three would indulge in a bit of shop-talk and then they would get to the important discussion: the quality of _this _pie over previous pies. It was a minor little ritual, but an important one to Jack, more important than he'd consciously realised. It wasn't the same; it didn't even taste as good.

"Colonel O'Neill!"

Jack looked up to see Walter standing in the doorway. "General Hammond wants you in Major Carter's laboratory, sir, stat."

Obediently Jack hurried out of the Commissary and to the lab. As he approached the doorway he was swamped with a near tangible sense of anxiety but also hope. He went in, finding to his lack of surprise, General Hammond, Dr Fraiser, Teal'c, Carter and Daniel already present. Though he kept his face impassive, Daniel's mental mutter of: '_This has got to work, or I may just have to kill myself_', was a sentiment he wholeheartedly agreed with.

"Carter?" Jack asked Sam hopefully.

"I think we've done it, sir," Sam addressed General Hammond. "With your permission?"

"Go ahead, Major."

She stepped back from the desk lamp and Jack saw she was wearing heavy-duty plastic gloves to prevent skin-contact. "Colonel, please _lightly_ press your fingers on the base of the desk lamp on the left hand side and then remove your hand."

Moving forward, and aware that Daniel had moved to a distance of six feet away from him, Jack did as she requested. The alloy was cool to his fingertips, and he fancied he felt a slight 'give' in the metal, though nothing as obvious as a pressure pad.

"Now, Daniel, please…" Carter gestured to Daniel.

The younger man slowly and deliberately walked forward until he was a distance of four feet from Jack. He stopped, his face blank and his eyes a mystery.

"Colonel?" questioned General Hammond.

Jack drew in a breath, and consciously relaxed his muscles. Then concentrated. He concentrated a bit more. And…

"Nothing!" he beamed at Carter, fighting the tremendous urge to whoop and grab her and waltz with her around the room joyously. "Not picking up so much as the weather report, sir!"

"That's all it needed?" Janet Fraiser asked Sam with understandable astonishment.

"Yes, that's how it was designed –"

"Sergeant!" Hammond said and Walter appeared genie-like in the doorway. "I want this boxed and en route to Area 51 tonight. Make sure that the artefact is not touched with bare hands by anyone."

"Yes, sir." Walter hurried off.

"I want a full debrief in ten minutes," General Hammond announced, adding as he left, "Good work, Major Carter."

Hurrying out of the lab as the impulse to grab Carter remained too strong for his liking, Jack was in the unique situation of being _early_ for the first time in the history of the SGC as he entered the Briefing Room and sat at the conference table.

Within ten minutes everyone – including Major Davis, but you couldn't have everything – was present. Still, it could have been worse, Jack realised as he eyed the coffee pots someone had brought and left, he could have ended up telepathically linked to Paul Davisand then he would have had to have just ended it all.

Unusually, both Daniel and Sam immediately reached out for mugs and Jack registered fully their pallid features and dull eyes; clearly sleep had not factored in either of their schedules for the past three days, he acknowledged guiltily.

"Major Carter, Dr Jackson, are you both sure that the negation of the link is permanent and fully severed, rather than dormant?" General Hammond enquired, "I'm remembering Urgo at this point."

"He was on our minds too, General," Daniel said dryly, "but we're sure; the desk lamp was designed for short-term use lasting less than half of one Earth hour. The effect may even have worn off on its own eventually because of that."

"I am still unclear as to the point of creating such a device?" Teal'c said, shaking his head slightly as Major Davis hesitantly raised the coffee pot in silent question.

"It was a medical tool," Sam admitted.

Janet Fraiser paused in the act of adding sugar to her coffee. "A medical device? Are you sure?"

Daniel took up the explanation. "Yes, the house was a gold mine of information. The inventor's name was – as near as I can pronounce it – Sobahay. He was a medical doctor who created many medical devices and found breakthroughs in medicine, and became a bi-global hero on both Nemetae and Uhutac."

"He was the rainbow-coloured statues," Jack surmised, also passing on the coffee.

"Yes." Daniel confirmed. "He kept journals about his work but no personal diaries as such. From what I've been able to determine, he was Nemetae by race but he was born on Uhutac. Apparently he lost his entire family in childhood to a periodic pestilence common to both worlds and then entered a career in medicine."

"That's not an uncommon phenomenon," Dr Fraiser commented. "But what was the purpose behind that desk-lamp?"

"According to the planetary history in the Central Library, Nemetae and Uhutac discovered each other early on in their history via their Stargates." Daniel explained, "They were collaborative rather than confrontational and developed together technologically and culturally. Certain aspects of their society had things in common to our social structure in the Western Hemisphere, one of which was a paradoxical reverence of but also fear of doctors."

"Ah," Janet Fraiser suddenly nodded as all was revealed.

"I'm sorry, I seem to have missed this epiphany," General Hammond said dryly. "How is that relevant?"

Both Daniel and Sam shot Janet glances of desperate appeal that she quite rightly understood as pleas not to make them utter the phrase 'silly macho' in the presence of the _male_ two-star General, full Colonel and a Pentagon Major.

Smoothly stepping in, Janet turned to General Hammond and said, "Sir, in the West, we fear illness. When a person gets sick, they initially react with irritation: I haven't got time for this, etc. They down a few pills and get on with it. But if the illness persists, they start to worry. By the time they're seriously worried or ill enough to go to a doctor they've worked themselves up into a state of great anxiety, and so tell the doctor fibs."

Teal'c's eyebrow went up. "For what reason would anyone deliberately lie to their physician, Dr Fraiser?"

_Thank you, Teal'c_, Janet said inside her head for the perfect lead in, "It's psychological. Very few people flat out lie, but most do either downplay the pain they're in or leave out what they view to be the most minor symptoms. Since the doctor isn't psychic he or she can only make a diagnosis on what they are told. The doctor assures the patient there's probably nothing to worry about and the patient leaves, rationalising to himself frantically so by the time he's got home he's convinced himself that he was worrying about nothing because, hey, the doctor himself said that there was no problem."

"That's what the desk-lamp was designed for." Sam took up the explanation now the danger of 'uttering unfortunate phrases to superior officers' was past. "Sobahay realised that a lot of time, money and pain could be avoided if doctors had a way to gauge what was _really _their patients' problem."

"In that case it would be a brilliant invention," Dr Fraiser assured General Hammond sincerely. "The permanent incapacity and-stroke-or death rate from incorrect or delayed diagnoses would drop through the floor if a doctor knew what the patient was leaving out. Then there would be the money saved on any social security system they had because it would be easy to tell a malingerer wanting a week off work from someone genuinely in pain. The savings in time and money would be astronomical."

Sam dipped her head in agreement at this assessment and concluded her explanation, "That's why Sobahay designed the desk-lamp. Basically from his journals it seems that when a patient entered the consulting room, the doctor would make some pretext for him or her to touch it and it would then activate."

"Which explains why I got the whammy even though only Daniel touched it?" Jack put in.

"Yes, sir," Sam nodded. "The physician then knew everything the patient was really thinking and feeling and most importantly leaving out. When the consultation was over, the physician made some pretext to touch the 'lamp' himself and that terminated the link. Apparently Sobahay was acutely aware of the potential for abuse so he severely limited the range of the device to five-and-a-half feet, which is about the size of a consulting room on Nemetae and Uhutac. The lamp activated at Daniel's touch and automatically made the link to the second person in range."

"All I had to do was touch it," muttered Jack grumpily.

General Hammond shot him a brief, quelling command with his eyes. "Can I take it as read that this Sobahay also invented the sarcophagus?"

"Yes, General," Daniel admitted.

"Is there anything that explains why someone so dedicated would create such a monstrous thing?" Dr Fraiser asked with concern.

"Oh yes, it was a mistake," Daniel said ruefully, obviously genuinely regretful on behalf of the long-dead Nemetae inventor. "The sarcophagus was not originally invented as the sarcophagus."

"In what way, Dr Jackson?" Major Davis asked.

"Some of the data I got from Sobahay's residence is damaged beyond irretrievability, despite Sam's best efforts," Daniel apologised, "but basically the Nemetae and Uhutacis developed a joint Space Navy as it were. Unfortunately with the best will in the world, there is only so much maximisation of space you can pull off in even the best-designed space-going tin can."

"That's where the sarcophagi came in," Sam put in. "The Space Navy also wasn't the fastest in the universe and Sobahay realised that inevitably some people were going to die from injuries that they might have survived had they been able to access the full range of medical techniques available on Uhutac or Nemetae that just couldn't be factored into a spaceship sick bay."

"So the sarcophagi were stasis tubes?" guessed Major Davis.

"More or less, yes." Sam finished her second mug of coffee and looked wistfully at the pot, which Janet Fraiser obligingly pushed within reach. "According to what Daniel translated of Sobahay's initial journals the sarcophagi were designed as stasis pods in which the critically injured could be placed and kept alive until the ship could get back home, at which point the full medical knowledge of their people could be brought into play."

"It was a very good idea," Daniel said sadly.

_Except that they make you evil and crazy junkies._ There was a sudden dead silence and Jack closed his eyes. "I said that out loud, didn't I?"

To his surprise, Daniel, no less, gave a snort of faint amusement, "That unfortunately was the spanner in the works. Tragically, nobody realised that the sarcophagi contained a terrible flaw."

"How could they miss it?" Janet challenged in understandable astonishment.

Daniel shrugged. "According to Sobahay's research journals, the daughter of the Nemetae Empress was serving aboard an exploration ship on a long-term deep-space mission and was killed outright in some sort of accident. The Captain had her body placed in the ship's sole stasis chamber to return her home in…optimum condition…for want of a better phrase. Apparently the equivalent of two weeks later the crew were terrified out of their minds when the princess came walking down the corridor having woken up, exited the pod and gone back to her duty station unaware she was supposed to be dead."

"But surely previous use of the sarcophagus had clued them in?" Janet persisted.

Sam shook her head, "According to the information on the PDAs, on the few occasions that the sarcophagi had been used prior to that, the ships had been reasonably close to home and hadn't had time to work their whammy on the occupants."

"Wait, two weeks?" Major Davis frowned, "But sarcophagi work much faster than that."

"The version of the technology we know does," Daniel corrected. "The Goa'uld must have somehow souped up the technology into the device we have today, which works a great deal faster than the original version. Once it was realised what the sarcophagi did, Sobahay began to work to make the process slightly faster, unwittingly magnifying the flaws too."

"So the Nemetae and Uhutacis eventually destroyed each other and themselves, I take it?" General Hammond concluded regretfully.

"Unfortunately, yes," Daniel admitted. "At first there wasn't a problem. Both societies used the sarcophagus to eradicate death, and as a result, the birth rate plummeted – as has happened to the Asgard by virtue of their cloning technology; all the Asgard are _all_ the Asgard. Using the technology occasionally was okay but the very old needed to use the sarcophagus frequently to maintain their arrested ageing and consequently became well, OAP hoodlums."

There was a pause while they all digested that image, then Daniel explained, "Also unfortunately, kids are kids everywhere. At some point the equivalent of teenagers jumped into a sarcophagus while healthy and discovered that using a sarcophagus without being injured or dead –"

"Creates an intense feeling of well-being, vitality and energy," Dr Fraiser finished sadly. "And I have no doubt the craze spread amongst the Nemetae and Uhutaci youth?"

"Exactly, that was the beginning of the end." Daniel sighed in regret of the loss of such a potentially great culture. "By the time anyone realised that they had violent, addicted psychopathic elders and violent, addicted psychopathic children the damage had been done. The birth rate had been zero for over a century so there were no younger, undamaged siblings and any new children would have been born addicted to the sarcophagus like their parents, similar to crack-addicted babies born today in this country. It makes tragic reading, to be honest. Sobahay spent the rest of his life desperately trying to fix the problem –"

"But just like Malachi with that Ancient time machine, he couldn't fix the flaw causing addiction and violent personality changes and still make the thing work," Jack stated rather than asked.

"That pretty much sums it up, General," Sam agreed. "By that point, both societies were completely dependent on the sarcophagus technology and the ever-increasing spread of amoral, sociopathic citizens did the rest. Sobahay destroyed all knowledge of how to manufacture the devices in despair but it seems he was killed trying to find food in a riot. Once the technology began to break down and required repair the situation just escalated. Warlords deliberately destroyed sarcophagi and then either enslaved others or extorted vast sums to use it."

"They went to war with each other over control of the sarcophagi and destroyed each other?" Major Davis correctly estimated.

"Essentially yes," Daniel confirmed. "Eventually a group of Nemetae warlords decided to pre-emptively exterminate the Uhutacis and steal all their sarcophagi. Unfortunately for them the Uhutacis had the same idea and their fleets wiped each other out. What few managed to survive the global inferno on both planets had no food, or shelter or the skills to obtain either. Those that didn't die from sarcophagus withdrawal would have starved or frozen to death in winter. At some point the Nimrod Goa'uld briefly found Uhutac but was killed before it could go back and the Goa'uld somehow found the sarcophagi elsewhere but never tracked them back to their world of origin."

**Epilogue**

In SG-1's locker room, Jack finally finished drying his hair – a task that he had deliberately eked out far longer than normal. He knew what he had to do, but that didn't mean he had to like it.

He sat on the central benches as he pulled on his boots, thinking back to the Briefing Room last week, or rather, as he mentally nicknamed it, 'Daniel & Sam Explain It All'. After relating the fall of the Nemetae and Uhutac civilisations, the discussion had moved on to the sarcophagus as developed by the Goa'uld after they presumably stumbled across the technology. At that point, Carter had tossed in her verbal grenade with the information that the sarcophagus technology was, in fact, exterminating the Goa'uld as a species even as it was a vital component in enabling them to hang on to their galactic power.

As always, however, there was sting in the tail of this seemingly great news. Somehow in her three-day window, Carter had produced a twenty page report that she had distributed around the table. Jack's brain still hurt but after five or six readings, it had slowly percolated.

As far as Jack understood it the Goa'uld were basically an asexual species with the exception of the Queens, who were definitely female. However, all Goa'uld – with the exception of the queens – produced what Carter described as sort of 'free-floating DNA strands' like twigs in a river. Each queen Goa'uld collected some of this DNA from as many other Goa'uld as possible. They preferred those Goa'uld spawned by another queen, but their own adult offspring would be used if necessary. These DNA strands were then spliced first with each other to create optimum potential and then with the semen of a male of the intended host species once the queen was ready to spawn.

Jack had winced at that sentence, deliberately not looking at Daniel; he could practically feel the humiliated heat of the other man's blush.

Carter had then launched into full technobabble, possibly to distract their attention away from Daniel: "It's why the Goa'uld have such a superb immune system, General. You see, the Queen can store the DNA from the ordinary Goa'uld indefinitely, but what's really important is that she can recombine different DNA strands to her own personal specifications. If Goa'uld 'A' has a bit of DNA for making its tail longer that is unusually good but Goa'uld 'B' has a different bit of DNA, say for making it swim faster, that is unusually good, the queen can attach that bit of Goa'uld 'A' DNA to that bit of Goa'uld 'B' DNA, and jettison the rejected material – "

"Creating DNA strand 'C' which is better than A & B because the new strand has both abilities instead of just one?" Jack had tried valiantly, more to stop the flow than anything else.

Carter had beamed at him with positive ebullience. "Exactly! The queen keeps collecting DNA samples and refining them as better bits come along."

She'd lapsed in Mad Scientist North American dialect again but the basic gist of it (Jack tried so hard not to think about this part) was that when humans or any other 'bi-gender species' had sex, the male released billions of bits of DNA into the female. Sometimes the female got a really cracking bit of DNA – like Albert Einstein's mother, for instance, but most of the time it was Joe Average, and sometimes the mother received a dud bit of DNA, resulting in conditions such as Down's Syndrome or autism. What the Goa'uld queens did meant they ended up with an almost flawless strand of DNA with which to produce larvae.

At that point, Carter had broken off the flow as she looked at Jack's blank expression and realised he was floundering – nor was he the only one. Thinking quickly, she said, "Imagine it as if someone put priceless diamonds, lesser jewels like rubies, and worthless pebbles in a bucket and really mixed them up. When male and female mate, it's like closing your eyes and plunging your hand into the bucket – it's pot luck what you come up with. The Goa'uld queen's process means that she basically is like someone searching through the bucket and picking out just the diamonds. The queen's ability to eliminate flawed DNA and pass only the best on to the larvae is what makes the Goa'uld immune system so damn brilliant."

"So how does the host species come in?" It had been Janet Fraiser who'd asked the question, to Jack's eternal gratitude.

"The queen has to have the semen of a male of the intended host species." Carter had resolutely pretended not to notice the mass flinch of every male at the table – even Teal'c had blinked rather rapidly at that statement. "She then sorts through the DNA of each spermazoa, splicing the best of the host DNA with the DNA she's already collected from the ordinary Goa'uld, thus ensuring nearly perfect compatibility with the host of the nearly perfect larvae."

"Great," Jack had muttered. "So the Goa'uld were genetically perfect on top of everything else _before_ the sarcophagus got near them, so I don't see how we'll never get rid of them."

"Uh, actually sir, the Goa'uld's survival as a species is very precariously balanced, the margin of error that would precipitate their extinction is almost non-existent."

"Carter you just said genetically perfect!"

With dogged determination, Jack had managed to follow her explanation. The basic issue was that the Goa'uld queen's method was labour intensive. In order to prevent inbreeding and degradation of the gnome – no, wait that wasn't right. Standing up, Jack paused and concentrated as he pulled on the blue jacket of his BDUs over his black T-shirt. Green gnome? No, no, gee-gnome, yeah that was it.

Apparently each queen had to produce thousands of larvae at every spawning cycle to ensure a…a…'sufficiently wide DNA resource pool to maintain genetic diversity'…and as Teal'c had suddenly said, though not in those precise words, Goa'uld larvae were pretty much useless at surviving to mature. The larvae needed somewhere consistently warm and environmentally stable during the first year of their life or they died _en masse_. Even assuming they made it to adulthood, genetically perfect as the Goa'uld were, one in two implantations had failed, killing both Goa'uld and host. Teal'c had grimly reminded those at the table that those facts were the reason why the ancestors of the Jaffa had been genetically modified by the Goa'uld in the first place. According to Carter, the infant mortality rate amongst Goa'uld larvae was still running at 60 even with the Jaffa and it was probably closer to 90 before that.

"There's also the problem that they've put all their reproductive eggs in one basket, so to speak," Daniel had chimed in at the point, despite that his ears had still been slightly pink and his face Hathor-haunted after Carter's talk of sperm and semen. "The primordial Goa'uld on the Goa'uld/Unas homeworld were originally self-locomoting predators who exhibited primitive sentience, like the Unas. I believe that they would have developed into a bi-gender species eventually, but the introduction of naqahdah to the species via that meteorite strike in one of the Goa'uld pools sent their species development off in a wildly different direction. The naqahdah enabled the Goa'uld intelligence to develop by leaps and bounds but the change from a self-propelling, self-determining species to a limbless, physically helpless form during the development of the symbiotic parasite/host relationship led directly to their current danger of extinction."

Nobody had set anything for several moments after that, mainly Jack suspected because they had been giving him time to decode Daniel's explanation. Carter, bless her, had laid it out more slowly and clearly for him. The upshot was that the Goa'uld's highly specialised way of procreation had given them an enormous tactical advantage in their nearly invincible immune systems, but the lack of reproductive diversity meant that their species was always balanced on a knife edge.

Carter had explained, "The massive loss of life amongst larval Goa'uld means that _theoretically_ we could exterminate the species in a generation if we could kill what few do survive, relatively speaking. Besides that, very, very few Goa'uld queens exist in comparison with the total number of larvae. A Goa'uld Queen's greatest desire is to produce a daughter but most never do. Many queens spawn again and again and again, producing millions of larvae, without ever producing a new queen."

"Indeed," Teal'c had spoken again at that point, his face thoughtful. "Neither Isis nor Hathor ever spawned a queen to my knowledge. The queen who spawned Ammonet was indeed ancient in Goa'uld terms, and during all her lifespan, I believe Ammonet was the only queen she ever produced."

"If Egeria had spawned a queen while birthing the Tok'Ra, they too wouldn't be facing extinction. If I were to die tomorrow –" Sam Carter paused as Jack, Teal'c and Daniel visibly flinched in unison, "- the death of a single human woman of reproductive age isn't even a blip on the genetic radar of the human species. But the death of a Goa'uld queen is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. Goa'uld queens are very rare, and very rarely produce a daughter. From what I remember of Jolinar's knowledge, the number of Goa'uld queens has been steadily declining for millennia."

"Yet they still rule the galaxy!" Jack had pointed out to everyone with some asperity.

Jack closed his locker and double-checked his reflection in the mirror for safety: fly zipped, etc. According to Carter, that was where the sarcophagus, amongst other things, had come into play. The Goa'uld had essentially – or so it would seem at face value - lucked out. There were proportionally far less Goa'uld in contrast to billions of humans and Asgard and Nox, etc., but the only reason the Goa'uld were in their present position of power was because they were 'lucky' enough (Carter had made inverted speech marks with her fingers at that point) to somehow come across useful technologies like the sarcophagus in their early travels from their homeworld. Without the sarcophagus, the Goa'uld death rate would be even more astronomically high than it already was.

Earnestly Carter had said to them all, "Doesn't it strike you as odd that most of the system lords are _old Goa'uld? _Lord Yu is over 7,000 Earth years old in his _current _host and he's going senile, so it's safe to push his age to nearer 20,000 Earth years. But, the Goa'uld who would normally come up and step into the shoes of their elders just aren't there. If not for the sarcophagus, the Goa'uld would have become a galactic footnote millennia ago."

"I'm not seeing that, Major," Jack had growled, having by that point a serious headache.

"The Nemetae and the Uhutacis showed what would happen, Colonel," Carter had simplified as best she could. "The system lords are a dead end because they can't contribute to the next generation of Goa'uld. The sarcophagus heals at a terrible price. Any Goa'uld who uses it is guaranteed immortality at the cost of irreparably damaged DNA which is useless to a Goa'uld queen. The queens themselves face the same choice – if they use the sarcophagus, they have immortality, but their ability to reproduce is severely compromised and there will be no new queens."

"Hathor didn't seem to have any trouble" Jack had instantly and bitterly regretted the comment as soon as he made it and from the glance General Hammond shot at him it was a good thing looks could not literally kill.

Daniel hadn't blanched, though his eyes had hardened. "I did some checking after…Hathor was one of the few system lords who had rarely used the sarcophagus – she actually changed hosts rather than use it, which is highly unusual since a Goa'uld will retain a chosen host almost beyond reason. Even though she'd only used it a few times, her chances of producing a daughter were knocked down by about 90."

Interposing quickly in the conversation, to Jack's inner gratitude, Janet Fraiser revealed that she had tested the remains of Hathor's larvae and other queens' larvae against that of other Goa'uld who didn't use the sarcophagus, like the Tok'Ra and specimens taken from the lakes on the Goa'uld homeworld. There was a significant degradation of quality in those Goa'uld born of a sarcophagus-using queen and those spawned of a queen that didn't or had no access to one. Nowhere big enough to be of use to humans at this point in time, true, but it made a colossal difference to the Goa'uld. In short, according to the good doctor, it would certainly have been a miracle if Hathor had produced a daughter.

"On top of that, the sarcophagus turns the Goa'uld psychopathic, so they don't even protect their own young," Daniel had finished off. "The Goa'uld population dropped below sustainable levels probably centuries ago, but the System Lords still think nothing of slaughtering a rival System Lord's Jaffa by the thousands."

"You are correct Daniel Jackson. Instances such as Cronos murdering my father for failing to win an impossible battle that had already lost him over 5,000 Jaffa were a common occurrence amongst the System Lords," Teal'c had confirmed.

"Yes, and also killing just as many symbiotes along with them." Daniel had pointed out. "The System Lords are so locked into personal power and self-survival at all costs that they just don't realise their species is in serious trouble."

"The Goa'uld are a doomed race." Carter's voice had quiet but nevertheless attention-grabbing to everyone at the table. "In order for a Goa'uld queen to maintain her position of power as a System Lord's consort, she must resort to a sarcophagus or face the vulnerability of seeking a new host every couple of centuries."

"Taking the latter course of action creates a very high risk of injury or death to the queen given the unpredictability of successful blending," Teal'c had announced with evident satisfaction.

Sam Carter had continued, "Right, however, the former action guarantees personal safety but renders the queen effectively sterile since she can only produce poor-quality asexual larvae and not the daughter she needs to carry on her lineage. Basically, General Hammond, it's a great pity that humanity needs the Goa'uld destroyed as quickly as possible. If we had the luxury of being able to just sit here and watch for about 500 years, the problem of the Goa'uld would take care of itself."

Carefully, Jack exited the locker room when he was sure that there was nobody else around. That had indeed been a bittersweet treat; if only Earth had the wherewithal to protect the planet from invasion by the Goa'uld, they could spend the next five centuries fishing and watching **_The Simpsons_** until the Goa'uld imploded on their own. Typical of SG-1's luck.

Jack walked along the corridors until he got to the junction of Daniel's lab. He really wasn't looking forward to this, but the onus was on him to set things right as he bore the major responsibility for this mess. General Hammond had been satisfied with SG-1's results; he'd also been able to have everything shipped to Area 51, including the sarcophagi, without it being an insult to Daniel. All the secondary teams were now on Nemetae and Uhutac, doing their egghead best to figure it all out. As yet nobody had found a working, or more importantly, working _and occupied_ sarcophagus on either world and it didn't look like they would – the devastation on both planets was total.

So on the surface it was BAU – Business As Usual. Everyone was polite and pleasant, amicable and affable, serene and smiling. It was also a total crock. Daniel was still currently demonstrating all the personality of a fence post. He was like how Margaret Thatcher's hubby had described his role when she was Prime Minister in an interview segment Jack had once caught on News At Eleven…oh yeah, "always present, but never there." Daniel's body was present and correct but for the animation he showed everything that made Daniel, well, Daniel, had shipped out to the moon.

Jack had never needed to be good at the 'talking about feelings' thing; he knew that and knew it was a failing, but that didn't mean it was any easier to overcome. As the only child of two loving parents, he'd grown up in a close-knit family where his parents lovingly made sure they knew what their child was thinking and feeling. Sarah had likewise been charmed and understanding of his hesitant courtship, finding it a refreshing change from the arrogant bombast of too many military males who thought the mere sight of a uniform was enough to get them laid and mistook a pained wince as a winsome invitation. Sarah had had military relatives; she understood Jack couldn't be around all the time and that he had to go into dangerous situations he couldn't talk about.

Jack gnawed at his lip, aware that sooner or later someone was going to come past and enquire why Colonel O'Neill was dithering in a corridor. Wouldn't that be humiliating? The fact was Sarah had ended their marriage because Jack couldn't or wouldn't communicate. Even as she handed him the divorce papers, she had assured him that she in no way blamed him for Charlie's death. Sarah had grown up with guns present in her own family home without incident and harsh as it sounded for her to say, Charlie had been more than old enough to know right from wrong and understand fully his wilful disobedience in picking up the gun expressly forbidden.

She had told Jack that she was divorcing him because after Charlie's death he had shut down and shut everyone and everything, including her, firmly out. Jack had buried himself with Charlie, and Sarah had grown sick and tired of bashing her head against the towering wall he had erected. She had determined that she could either move forward with her life and the healing process, or she could jump into her son's grave along with Jack. The divorce was her way of choosing the first option.

Now Jack could see that this whole thing with Daniel was going the same way. One day somebody might succeed in destroying his team from without, but SG-1 was far too important not to just to the planet Earth but to the entire galaxy to be allowed to disintegrate from within. Saving his friendship with Daniel was far more vital on several levels than preserving his marriage to Sarah had been and Jack knew that he needed to learn from his massive mistakes then to save his and Daniel's relationship now.

Jack had lost his parents to the inevitability of old age when he was an adult, but Daniel had been ripped from the sheltering safety of a loving family by tragedy. As an officer supposedly proficient in leadership, Jack knew that it was important to give appropriate commendation and encouragement; it did far more than medals sometimes in boosting morale and esteem. Daniel looked towards Jack as the closest thing to a sibling he had and Jack had to admit he'd fallen down on the job. He was far more likely to use deflating sarcasm and point out when Daniel had got it wrong than to even try and look at things from another angle.

That self-admonition in no way made this any easier to do; he sucked in a controlling breath as he looked at the door. Daniel did not have an open lab now; Jack knew that the closed door was a warning system, a way to give Daniel a few seconds of alert that someone – say a crazed Colonel – was entering the room.

Stepping forward, Jack grasped the handle and made sure he made plenty of noise as he opened the door, stepped inside the lab and allowed the door to swing shut behind him.

At the centre workstation, Daniel had immediately looked up from the dusty, heavy textbooks that were his usual reading material. Apart from a fractional widening of the eyes, his expression was blandly enquiring.

Heartily wishing he was doing something less traumatic like single-handedly charging a Jaffa gun turret, Jack said, "We need to talk."

Daniel blinked slowly as if momentarily uncertain that he had actually heard those words issue from Jack O'Neill's mouth, then his face set. "I think that would be a bad idea. I'm very busy," he denied curtly.

Okay, so this was going to be totally agonising. Feeling himself started to sweat, Jack ploughed on while sternly lecturing himself to be rational and logical and not to yell, "Look, Daniel, this whole situation got out of hand, I'll admit –"

"I'm not interested, Jack," Daniel cut him off.

"Damn it, I need you!"

"For what? To be your whipping boy of choice–"

"To stop another Euronda!" At last he'd shut Daniel up, though doubtless not for long. He needed to get his point across, and Jack realised he was going to have to peel back his flippancy to reveal some painful honesty. Slowly he admitted, "I've spent all my adult life in the military, Daniel. Sometimes I get a little too much tunnel vision."

"Yeah…" Daniel was less aggressive now but his entire stance was practically screaming, _so why should I grant mea culpa?_

Choosing his words carefully, Jack confessed, "I depend on you to be the voice of reason when I'm blinded by the glittering gadgetry dangled in front of us. I rely on you to spot the inconsistencies and deceptions. I know I don't always act like I appreciate it, but I do value you and what you do for us, even though I admit I'm often very loud –"

"- Obnoxious," amended Daniel, folding his arms.

Gritting his teeth but acknowledging the shot, Jack conceded, "and stubborn -"

" – obstinate –"

" – and okay, a bit irritable -"

" - boneheaded –"

"Daniel!"

Daniel immediately shut up but his lips twitched infinitesimally and something inside Jack relaxed. Slight thought it was, the sign that he could restore Daniel's good humour indicated that he was at least 'forgiven' on some level.

"What I'm trying to say is that I know I'm usually very…_brusque_…" Jack managed to remember the snazzier way of saying 'dismissive' at the last minute, "but you have to know that I would never deliberately set out to denigrate your contribution. It's just that sometimes I have to make unpalatable choices, like with Reese –"

Despite standing with his arms folded forbiddingly across his chest and bearing a highly sceptical expression on his face, Daniel had been relaxing and even nodding slightly at Jack's speech, but now he went rigid again, his eyes hardening as he closed off and warned, "You don't want to go there, Jack."

"Damn right, but it looks like I need to," Jack shot back with burgeoning re-irritation. "Contrary to your fond imagining – and we'll leave aside the debate about where you get off thinking yourself qualified to make that judgement – I wasn't exactly laughing with maniacal glee as I happily murdered that poor helpless, oh yes, homicidal android."

"It was about the only thing you didn't do!" Daniel retorted. "I was the one who promised her we would _help_ her only for you to burst through the door like some Rambo rip-off and gun her down like you were trying to make your getaway from a bank heist. You never gave her a chance from the start-"

"Of course I didn't! Don't you get it, Daniel?" Jack discarded his good intentions as he yelled, "I can't give anyone a chance, if I did I'd be dead and the Earth would be ruled by assholes with glowing eyes!"

"What!" Daniel was completely taken aback by the venom and vehemence Jack displayed.

"This is important, so stay with me," Jack snapped harshly but then drew in a deep breath and plonked himself down on the nearby lab stool. He stared at Daniel for a long moment, and then began to explain the world in which he lived with slow reluctance. "Daniel, I'm a military officer. When you serve in the military the focus is always on the _mission_. It has to be, otherwise you get distracted; if you're distracted you make mistakes, and when you make mistakes, good men and women, people of intelligence and courage and wit and humour and far more talent than you, often end up dead."

"Jack…" Daniel began, upset in his own right and intending to placate and get rid of Jack with an acquiescing homily.

This was too important to be sidetracked, so Jack simply ignored his attempted interruption. "Whenever and wherever we go as SG-1, in the back of my mind I _know_ that there is always the possibility I will have to kill someone we meet out there – or sacrifice them for the greater good."

As he stopped again, Daniel remained silent and Jack said a quick prayer of thanks for the fact that Daniel was for once _really_ listening to him.

"Of course Reese was a real child, regardless of how she was constructed. I don't know why her 'father' designed her that way; maybe you were right and he downloaded the consciousness of his own lost little girl into a robot body. What I'm trying to say is that I didn't and I don't have the luxury of considering such possibilities because they are detrimental to my duty to protect and defend my team, the SGC and the whole planet." Jack sighed, "Danny, my son shot himself with _my own gun_ – how could I ever have pulled the trigger if I'd admitted to _me_ that Reese really was a little girl in all the ways that counted?"

Daniel lowered his eyes and mirrored Jack's example, hooking a boot round the nearest lab stool and slowly sinking onto it as if too weary to stand. For a moment he contemplated Jack's tired face but insisted softly, "She stopped the replicators, Jack."

Jack inclined his head, acknowledging the point, but emphasised, "Daniel, I may have been telepathic these last few days, but clairvoyance has never been in my repertoire. I and my friends were being attacked by swarms of replicators, my CO was about to blow us all up, Carter radioed that Reese was losing control of at least some replicators just as I got inside the Gate Room in time to see the crazy super-android way too close to my crumpled friend whose wrist she had clearly just broken and who looked as if she was about to attack again. That was the information I had available and I acted accordingly. Sure if I knew now – but I _didn't_ know."

"I get that." Daniel conceded the point quietly, obviously having never considered the tragedy from the perspective of what it must have been like from Jack's viewpoint. Jack had had no way of knowing what had transpired in the Gate Room. Daniel stared at his hands as he had to admit that had he been the one to get in and seen Reese standing over an obviously injured Jack with possible intent to further harm or kill he would probably have reacted identically – protect his friend first and sort out the whys and wherefores afterwards.

Jack interrupted his mental revelation, "Do you? Do you really think that's all it was, just because I 'had it in' for Reese? It's hard Daniel, to have to be prepared to do the unthinkable. I spent days half-convinced I was going to have to kill Loren."

"Loren?" Daniel blinked in confusion over the boy Jack had taken a liking to at the Goa'uld 'opium palace', who was now in the care of a security-cleared USAF family.

Jack shrugged, "Yeah, it was obvious from the start he was hiding something big time and when I found _you_ about to take a swan dive off your balcony I half-assumed that Loren was a budding psychopath who'd killed his parents with some weird poison and was now trying it on us. Same with Cassandra; Carter wouldn't leave her because she was awake, so if that device of Nirrti's had actually gone nova we'd have heard Sam being obliterated too."

"But you…could have left her."

"Yes," Jack clearly heard Daniel mentally use the "w" instead of the "c" that actually came out of his mouth. "If it had been necessary, I could have walked away, because that's my job. My mission is protecting the planet, but what I do is make sure my people make it home alive at the end of the day."

"I _do _get it, Jack." Daniel found himself trying to reassure Jack, finding himself perturbed by the despondency so visible but never before displayed in the man sitting opposite him. He'd never really registered the completely grey hair and the tired eyes. It always caused a faint resonance of shock to remember that Jack had been retired when General Hammond recalled him; you were so deeply involved in his energy and vitality that you completely forgot Jack O'Neill was half-a-century old.

Jack drew in a breath. "It's a terrible responsibility, Daniel. When I served in Desert Storm, we had 6 year old Iraqi boys smiling and waving at us and then diving into the nearest alley to whip out a cell phone and tell insurgents where to ambush us. When the terrorists did that, half of them were the 6-year-olds' 10-year-old brothers. These kids should have been thinking about Little League and instead I had 4th and 5th graders brainwashed by mad mullahs trying to cut my people in half with Kalashnikovs. If I wanted to survive and I wanted my team to survive I couldn't acknowledge that they were biologically children. I have to be able to do whatever it takes to ensure that my people, my team, make it. Occasionally I make mistakes like Euronda. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Jack, I do understand what you're trying to say…Euronda…well, I was dazzled by the shiny baubles they were dangling in front of us at first too. I'm not talking about _what_ you did, Jack. I'm talking about the _way_ you changed on me. I freaked out because I saw you turning into that sorry excuse for a Colonel, Frank Simmons in front of me."

"No way," Jack protested instinctively.

Daniel nodded solemnly, but decided he needed to drive home his point once and for all, so he went in for the kill. "It's the first time I was ever scared of you, Jack."

Bingo! Direct hit in the middle of Jack City. For an instant Daniel was petty enough to let the moment hang as Jack twitched in recoil, his eyes flaring with visible distress at this statement, then he told his friend firmly, "But it's not going to happen again. What makes scum like the NID so bad is that in all the ways that count, they're Goa'uld, only we can't cure their psychopathy just by taking a snake out of them. Euronda was the top of the slippery slope to that sort of mentality, Jack, but I'm not going to let you end up like Simmons and Maybourne. I am not going to lose you to the Dark Side."

"Thanks…I think," Jack added dryly. "So we're cool?"

"Yes, Jack," Daniel confirmed equally dryly.

"So I don't have to do this emoting thing any more? Great." Now that everything was back to how it should be, Jack's natural ebullience bounced back to full chipper annoyingness.

"I need to get back to work, Jack, if I'm to make this presentation tomorrow to that new delegation –"

"Ah, piece of cake." Jack practically bounced of his stool, deciding he'd try the pie in the Commissary again. "The Kellogs seem eager to trade for anything we'll give 'em!"

Suppressing a chuckle, Daniel couldn't help but smile as he corrected gently, "Kelowna, Jack…"

THE END

© 2005, Catherine D Stewart

**_The Cure_**, the second in this loosely-linked trilogy of stories, will be posted in the future.


End file.
